Parks and People: Managing Outdoor Recreation at Acadia National Park

Conclusion: Managing Parks and People

Conclusion Managing Parks and People The preceding chapters present a wide-ranging program of research designed to support management of outdoor recreation at Acadia. These studies address the primary geographic units of the park, including Mount DesertIsland , SchoodicPeninsula, and IsleauHaut;principal visitorattractions, including the Park Loop Road and Ocean Drive, Cadillac Mountain, the carriage roads, the trail system, Sand Beach, and Jordan Pond House; major visitor activities, including sightseeing/driving for pleasure, hiking, camping , and biking; and a range of management issues, including crowding, conflict, coping, traffic congestion, parking, public transportation, impacts to park resources, and the effectiveness and acceptability of alternative management practices. These chapters were organized into the three principal components of the National Park Service’s Visitor Experience and Resource Protection (verp) framework as described in the Introduction: (1) formulation of management objectives/desired conditions and associated indicators and standards of quality, (2) monitoring indicator variables, and (3) management actions designed to maintain standards of quality for indicator variables . However, some studies have implications for more than one of these three components. The research described in these chapters (as well as related components of research that could not be included in the book) was designed to support application of the verp framework at Acadia and to help guide management of outdoor recreation more generally. This research has contributed to an ongoing program of planning and management at Acadia. Initial components of research focused on the park’s carriage roads and a plan for this popular and historic system of multi-use trails has been developed, adopted, and implemented (Jacobi and Manning 1997). Using findings from research, an interdisciplinary team of park staff  C O N C L U S I O N  formulated a set of crowding and conflict-oriented indicators and standards of quality for the visitor experience on two recreation opportunity zones comprising this area. Indicators of quality are monitored at regular intervals and management actions have been undertaken to help ensure that standards of quality are maintained. Research addressing the Schoodic Peninsula, Isle au Haut, and broader mdi sections of the park has been conducted more recently and plans for these areas are now being developed. This is in keeping with nps policy that requires all parks to have General Management Plans, and recent changes in this policy that require such plans to adopt central elements of the verp framework, including formulation of indicators and standards of quality. Of course, similar research has been conducted at a number of other parks and related areas, and all of this work has contributed to a substantive and growing body of knowledge about parks and people, including the impacts that visitors can cause to park resources and the quality of the visitor experience and how outdoor recreation might best be managed (Hammitt and Cole 1998; Manning 1999, 2007). This body of knowledge can be organized and presented in a series of emerging principles that can be used to guide planning and management of outdoor recreation at Acadia and related parks and outdoor recreation areas. This final chapter presents these principles and illustrates how they might be applied using examples from the program of research at Acadia. PRINCIPLES OF MANAGING OUTDOOR RECREATION 1. Outdoor recreation management should be guided by a three-fold framework of resource, social, and managerial concerns. Visitor use of parks and protected areas can impact vital natural and cultural resources, can degrade the quality of the visitor experience, and can lead to management practices that are inappropriate in type and intensity. Moreover, potentially important linkages exist among these components of outdoor recreation management. For example, visitor-caused impacts to natural resources can have aesthetic implications that degrade the quality of the visitor experience and lead to management practices that are unacceptable to some visitors. Comprehensive analysis and management of outdoor recreation requires explicit consideration of its resource, social, and managerial components. M A N A G I N G P A R K S A N D P E O P L E  The program of research at Acadia illustrates this three-fold framework of concerns in several ways. It’s clear that visitor use of Acadia results in associated impacts to (1) park resources (e.g., widening and erosion of park trails, trampling of soils and vegetation at campsites and the summit of Cadillac Mountain), (2) the quality of the visitor experience (e.g., crowding at attraction sites and along trails...