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ABSTRACT
Changes in temperature and precipitation can affect tourist experiences. This study examines how summer park visitation has changed in response to temperature and precipitation extremes. The study goals were two-fold. The first is to introduce a framework and the second is to test it in a pilot region with four mountainous National Parks. The framework is designed to compare the vulnerability of seasonal park visitation to shifts in a combined indicator of temperature and precipitation. It uniquely considers needed measurements, and the data required to conduct an analysis. The second goal is to test it in four destinations in the U.S. Northern Rockies, including Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Rocky Mountain National Parks. The preliminary test reveals outlier cases of visitation under wet and dry extremes. The analysis connects time series climate and visitation data for the peak summer season from 1991–2012. Outlier analysis illustrates more change in extremely dry conditions, with four out of the six dry-year outliers resulting in a visitation decline. Whether this decline in park tourism is attributable to climate features, economic factors, or conscious management decisions, these drops have significant economic impacts: estimates of changes in visitor spending during dry years are between roughly 9 and 90 million USD. These differences may be connected to the popular activities in each park, and the extent they are dependent on weather conditions. This framework can be used to test the relationship between climate and tourism visitation in other regions, in various seasons and time frames. The work may inform the tourist sector in adjusting and planning for a range of conditions. We discuss opportunities and conclude with additional needs for understanding the mechanisms behind risk in mountain park tourism under climate extremes.
摘要
由于国家公园地区温度与降雨的变化影响旅游体验, 所以使国家公园易于受到访问量降低的影响。本研究研究了国家公园夏季访问量面对温度与降雨极端情况所经历的变化。研究目标有二: 第一是引入一个框架, 该框架用来比较面对温度与降雨复合指标变化国家公园夏季访问量受影响的程度。该框架独特地考虑了所需的测量指标以及执行分析的数据可得性。第二是在有四个国家公园 (包括冰川国家公园、黄石国家公园、大蒂顿国家公园和洛基山国家公园) 的美国落基山脉北部地区检验了这个框架。初步结果揭示了国家公园访问量在极端降雨与干旱情况下访问量奇高与奇低的极端情况。分析结合了1991–2012年间国家公园夏季旺季气候与访问量的时间序列数据。异常值分析表明, 极端干旱天气将导致公园访问量更大的变化, 其中6 个极端干旱年份有4个年份导致了访问量的下降。不管公园游客量的降低是由于气候因素经济因素还是人为的管理决策, 游客量的降低都产生显著的经济影响: 干旱年份游客消费变化的估计值大约在9 百至9 千万美元。游客消费的变化可能与公园主要的旅游活动有关, 相关程度取决于天气情况。如果获得有关数据, 该框架可以用来检验不同地区、不同季节、不同时间范围内气候与旅游访问量的关系。该项工作可以帮助旅游部门调整与规划一系列变化情况。最后我们讨论了为理解山地公园在极端天气情况下山地旅游风险机制的机遇与额外的需要。
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Drs Olga Wilhelmi and Andy Wood, project scientists at the Research Applications Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Their input was fundamental in the early conceptual development and measurement of the socioeconomic variables and climate inputs, respectively. Dr Wonho Nam, assistant professor at Hankyong National University, Kyonggi-do, Korea, provided input for the suite of climate monitoring indices available; his guidance on the SPEI was especially helpful.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Building from previous studies, an inclusive approach should develop a sector-specific research framework relevant for a particular region or set of stakeholders.
2. It is worth mentioning de Freitas (Citation2003) acknowledged that selecting the basic outcome variable is only the first step, and additional research is warranted to develop a sector-specific design that would integrate the values with relevant climate aspects.
3. Involving stakeholders in the process improves the accuracy of research products (Pentland, Citation2014), and can also lead to improved compliance outcomes because participants develop their own monitoring guidelines. The recreation industry often participates in drafting drought preparedness plans in Colorado where two of the major stakeholders are Vail Resorts and the Colorado River Outfitters Association (Colorado Water Conservation Board, Citation2013).
4. Data constraints are more than a nuisance as measures of social phenomena rarely match the scale or units of the climatological data. When studying these effects over time, it becomes difficult to place trends in social and physical processes into comparable terms. For the sake of simplicity, a single indicator is needed that includes changes in both temperature and precipitation.
5. Following a global level analysis of time frames, increasing the length beyond the12-month SPEI was not shown to have improved accuracy (Beguería et al., Citation2014).
6. For reasons largely related to data constraints, comprehensive work on full climate features has not yet been done for Northern Rockies National Parks.
7. Since the combined effect of temperature and precipitation play a known role in tourist comfort, the study connects temperature and precipitation to Richardson and Loomis’ call to examine physical factors more closely.
8. One possible way private recreation industry leaders can do this may be to alter a marketing strategy or diversify the activities a company is providing. Recreation on public lands may have similar adaptive capacity.
9. Study limitations include the inability to design a quantitative metric for the amount of adaptive capacity in a system.
10. Other studies have used the information gathered from working with resort personnel on daily attendance, such as skier and snowboarder visits (Hamilton et al. Citation2007). This has also been modeled for future IPCC scenarios. This ‘contingent visitation analysis’ considers the effects of various hypothetical climate scenarios (like changes in temperature, precipitation, and snow depth) on the likelihood of people visiting national parks (Richardson & Loomis, Citation2004).
11. . The X signifies the visitation variable with i as the observed value, mu or X-bar as the mean, and S as the standard deviation.
12. Because Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain receive higher numbers of visits overall, it would not make sense to compare their changes in visitation to Glacier and Grand Teton.
13. These figures are for gateway regions, which Thomas and Koontz (Citation2016) define as the 60-mile area surrounding parks.
14. The results were contextualized with comments entered by park data technicians. Some of these comments are presented in the results and discussion as evidence to provide context for the observed trends.
15. This fits with Burton, Kates, and White (Citation1993), who argue that choice, human agency, and a consideration of individual decisions should determine the most effective responses to climate extremes.
16. This is especially important in the context of the 2015 Paris convention and follow-up 2016 Marrakech meetings, when countries formulated climate action plans aimed at meeting reductions targets.
17. Richardson and Loomis (Citation2004) consulted with a team of experts to understand the effects that projected changes (according to global climate model scenarios) would have on a national park. Changes included the number of days that trails remained snow-free for hiking, the number of days a high-elevation road would remain open, wildlife abundance, and vegetation composition. From these, a survey asked park visitors how likely they would be to visit, or whether they would shorten or lengthen their stay. Generally speaking, they find the impacts from these climate scenarios are less likely to prevent visitors from coming to a park, since they are planned well in advance. However, the length of stay was adjusted. In particular, extreme heat has a particularly noteworthy effect (Richardson & Loomis, Citation2004). This fits with what we would expect, given that recreation is voluntary and done for enjoyment (de Freitas, Citation2003).
18. Park recreators might consider waterway safety during peak runoff in high flow years, and also in low flow years when new rock features can emerge.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Theresa M. Jedd
Theresa Jedd is an environmental policy specialist and a post-doctoral researcher at the National Drought Mitigation Center in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She received a PhD in political science from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and her research seeks to understand vulnerability and adaptation in outdoor recreation under a variety of climate and weather conditions.
Michael J. Hayes
Michael Hayes is a professor in the applied climate and spatial sciences mission area within the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He received his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Hayes was with the National Drought Mitigation Center for 21 years and served as the NDMC's Director from 2007 to 2016.
Carlos M. Carrillo
Carlos M. Carrillo is a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell at the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. His background is in climate variability and meteorological modeling. He received his PhD in atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona.
Tonya Haigh
Tonya Haigh is a rural sociologist research specialist with the National Drought Mitigation Center in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She specializes in survey research methods and agricultural vulnerability and adaptation to drought.
Christopher J. Chizinski
Christopher Chizinski is an assistant professor of human dimensions of wildlife in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He received his MS and PhD degrees from Texas Tech University. His research focuses on the socio-ecological aspects of recreational hunting and fishing.
John Swigart
John Swigart is a geospatial analyst at the National Drought Mitigation Center, and writes code for a variety of drought monitoring applications in the United States and internationally. He received his MA degree in anthropology from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.