Recreation habitat suitability indices: key concepts and a framework for application in landscape planning.

Abstract

The use of any landscape for recreational purposes means that natural processes will be impacted and that resource use conflicts may develop. This conflict will be exacerbated where the goals of the recreationist conflict with legitimate resource extraction activities. In order to deal with these issues land use planners must integrate recreation such that potential conflicts are minimized and in some cases some activities may be prohibited. This paper discusses the concept of recreation habitat suitability indices (rHSI) as a means of identifying opportunities for recreation and potential conflicts/impacts with ecological processes, other resource users and other recreation "species." Outdoor recreation takes a variety of forms, with each form requiring different environmental conditions. Habitat requirements of recreationists can be understood within the confines of separate HSI for individual recreational activities. As such different recreation types can be considered as distinct recreation species with distinct recreation habitat needs. The preferred habitat of specific recreationists can be measured and can be used to predict recreation species use of an area even if such use does not currently occur. In this way planners can take into account the needs of human beings in the same manner that they do other species and reduce or eliminate significant environmental effects as well as conflict between different recreation "species" and recreation and other forest uses. In this paper we present a brief assessment of the applicability of the HSI model through an examination of the boreal canoeist recreation "species." This study was undertaken as one element in the broad area planning initiative for the east side of Lake Winnipeg.

L'utilisation de tout paysage a des fins recreatives signifie qu'il y aura des repercussions sur les processus naturels et que des conflits pourront naitre quant a l'utilisation des ressources. Et ce conflit sera exacerbe lorsque les objectifs des adeptes de plein air entrent en conflit avec les activites legitimes d'extraction des ressources. Afin de regler ces questions, les planificateurs de l'utilisation du sol doivent integrer la dimension recreative afin de reduire les conflits eventuels et dans certains cas, certaines activites pourraient etre interdites. Les auteurs de cet article analysent le concept de l'indice de qualite de l'habitat recreatif recreation habitat suitability indices (rHSI) comme moyen de reperer les occasions en matiere d'activite recreative et les conflits et repercussions potentiels relativement aux processus ecologiques, aux autres utilisateurs de ressources et aux autres << especes >> d'amateurs de plein air. Les activites recreatives de plein air prennent diverses formes qui requierent toutes des conditions environnementales distinctes. On peut comprendre les exigences des adeptes de plein air en se servant d'indices de qualite de l'habitat differents pour chacune des activites de plein air. Comme tel, on peut considerer les differents types d'activites recreatives comme des especes d'activites distinctes avec des besoins distincts en matiere d'habitat. On peut mesurer quel serait l'habitat de premier choix pour des adeptes de plein air particuliers et on peut se servir de ces mesures pour predire l'utilisation d'un secteur, meme lorsque cette utilisation n'a pas lieu actuellement. Les planificateurs peuvent ainsi tenir compte des besoins des etres humains de la meme maniere que pour les autres especes et reduire ou eliminer les effets significatifs sur l'environnement, de meme que les conflits entre les differentes << especes >> d'amateurs de plein air et les activites recreatives et autres usages de la foret. Dans cet article nous presentons une breve evaluation de l'applicabilite du modele d'indice de qualite de l'habitat par le biais d'une analyse de l'<< espece >> d'amateur de plein air canoeiste boreal. Cette etude a ete entreprise dans le cadre de l'initiative plus generale de planification de secteurs pour la rive est du lac Winnipeg.

Keywords

recreation, wilderness, visitor management frameworks, habitat suitability indices

Introduction

Research directed at recreation management in parks, wilderness, and protected areas has expanded greatly over the past three decades, reflecting the fact that much outdoor recreation takes place in landscapes under such jurisdiction. In Canada, however, a great deal of outdoor recreation occurs in undesignated and unprotected crown land. Currently, about 50% of Canada is forested, 57% of this is considered commercial and much of it is largely inaccessible (Rutledge and Volde 2001; Environment Canada 2003). Less than two per cent of this is protected through national parks, provincial parks or other legislated designations and yet is what many would consider "true wilderness" (here defined as vast tracts of roadless areas where natural processes predominate but where aboriginal people may still live and practice traditional resource harvest). The current definition of wilderness is often too focused upon the concept of protected from human incursion and often ignores the existence of human habitation, or inhabited wilderness. In addition, many areas used by recreationists--and considered as wilderness by them--lie outside of protected areas.

The management frameworks of ROS, LAC, Carrying capacity, VIM, VAMP, and VERP (1) have all been developed to assist in planning and managing recreation within areas that have some form of protected areas status (Payne and Nilsen 2002). However, few models have been developed to plan for outdoor recreation in the broader landscape outside of protected areas where recreation is only one of many uses. The aforementioned models do not provide adequate inputs for non-recreational use nor do they specifically identify particularly important recreational features, so they have minimal suitability for planning in the broader landscape.

Over the past 25 years, as commitment has grown for the inclusion of broader values in land planning, there has also been an attempt in Canada to develop a uniform national ecological approach to terrestrial ecosystem classification and mapping (Ecological Stratification Working Group 1995). This approach to classification incorporates ecological values such as biodiversity and habitat quality as an integral part of sustainable forest management. On a worldwide basis, concern for the conservation of biological diversity has become a major priority (Baydack et al. 1999). Researchers in Canada are cognizant of this fact, but also positioned to take forest management one step further by incorporating social values, such as recreation, as an intrinsic component of habitat assessment and measurement. The intent of this paper is to outline an approach for such integration.

The need to understand how humans use parks and natural areas for recreational activities is growing in importance. Research on why people use parks has been exhaustive but linking this information to in situ behaviour has been difficult. The social psychological approaches that have dominated leisure behaviour research are motivation and satisfaction theory. Major investigations into these concepts can be attributed to Neulinger in 1974 and Iso-Ahola in 1979. They exposed motivation, and specifically intrinsic motivation, as a key way of determining leisure behaviour (Mannell 1987). Their findings demonstrated that the situation or place that people were at had as much to do with self-actualization of a state of leisure as the activity itself. In essence, human beings depend on environmental settings as much as an activity in order to reach a state of satisfaction. Satisfaction measures, however, have been criticized as management tools due to incremental changes in visitor expectations and the displacement of "purists" (Manning, 1999). Furthermore, satisfaction is only measurable in a post-hoc fashion and seems best suited to pre-existing recreation areas where user characteristics are well known. As such, satisfaction--like other social psychological variables such as substitutability (e.g. Shelby and Vaske, 1991), specialization (e.g. Bryan, 1977) and purism (e.g. Stankey, 1972)--may have limited utility in multiple-use broad area planning where data about potential users is non-existant.