ABSTRACT:In urban and suburban recreation areas, walking and cycling constitute an important part of leisure activities. Both activities involving motion, are not only carried out for recreation but also for commuting to and from work. The mixture of recreation and commuting cycling is a challenge for park management. Conflicts between user groups, such as walkers and cyclists, exist due to the different movement speeds and also different user profiles: walkers, leisure cyclists and cyclists who commute have distinctive degrees of acceptance towards other user groups. Another challenge for park management is the damage caused by the bicycles. There is damage to the surface of gravel trails due to the frequency of use and there is damage to the vegetation next to the trails as a result of evasive manoeuvres by the cyclists. Paved trails are preferred by cyclists as this results in increased speed.Important issues associated with park management are: degradation of the soil surface in general, and trails in particular, as well as conflicts between different recreational users, such as walkers and cyclists caused by their different user profiles including different speeds and acceptance of social carrying capacities.To shed some light on bicycling activities in Vienna, an analysis of the pattern of the temporal use of daily frequency of recreational and commuting cyclists was carried out, taking weather conditions into consideration. The results show that, principally, cycling is an activity performed during fine weather. This is especially the case for recreational use. Fine weather is interpreted as generally sunny weather with an ambient temperature of more than 5°C, few clouds and no precipitation for a period of 1 year. In this study, the temperature, precipitation and cloud cover, as well as the thermal index 'physiologically equivalent temperature' (PET), were used as parameters to describe more precisely the dependence of both cyclist groups on the local weather conditions.

Past on-site experience was linked to the crowding perceptions and use displacement of 383 on-site visitors to the peri-urban Danube Floodplains National Park, Austria. Three visitor groups were determined according to their area experience: local residents from Vienna and rural communities, having the highest level of experience; regional visitors from the city and eastern Austria; and tourists from Austria and abroad with the lowest degree of experience. Crowding perceptions were significantly different across the user groups. More than 50% of local residents perceived the national park as crowded, whereas only 27% of regional visitors and 19% of tourists reported such an evaluation. Even among local residents and regional visitors, respondents with more on-site experience expressed a greater impression of a crowded park. Differences in crowding evaluations between local rural and urban residents and between regional rural and urban visitors were not found. For 27% of local residents and 15% of regional visitors, use levels were so unacceptable that they displaced temporally and spatially, whereas use displacement was relatively irrelevant for tourists. The use displacement strategies involved differ among the three user groups. Management implications were discussed, taking the specific situation of the small national park on the urban-rural fringe into consideration.

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Mountain protected areas play a fundamental role in the conservation of natural environment and at the same time provide the population with social benefits such as offering space for leisure and recreation. Understanding motivations and behavior of protected area visitors is crucial to effectively manage vulnerable areas. Our objective was to identify the profiles of visitors to a heavily used tourist destination—Kasprowy Wierch within the Tatra National Park (Poland), using the self-organizing maps (SOM) analytical method. In order to explore the socio-demographic and behavioral characteristics of the visitors a total sample of 2488 respondents were interviewed on site. Self-organizing map analysis is based on cerebral processes for managing and storing information in order to classify subjects and/or find relationships among variables. As a result, four heterogeneous tourist profiles were identified. Interestingly, two of these groups (Cluster 1 and Cluster 3), which were found to be the most challenging groups for management purposes, visited the national park for reasons other than its natural attractions. Especially, one sub-segment of Cluster 3 was mainly motivated by the possibility to use a cable car, admiring views and stayed within close proximity of the upper cable car station. Less than a half of visitors to Kasprowy Wierch (42%) were seeking a nature experience during their trip (Cluster 2 and Cluster 4). The results bring a new point of view in the discussion on visitor management within Kasprowy Wierch region, in particular by overlapping presented visitor segmentation with trip types and/or purchased cable car tickets. Within international context, we highlight the SOM technique as a valuable tool in profiling of tourists and underline the problem of the existence of mass tourism destinations within protected areas.

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