Protected Area Tourism in a Changing Climate: Will Visitation at US National Parks Warm Up or Overheat?

Abstract

Climate change will affect not only natural and cultural resources within protected areas but also tourism and visitation patterns. The U.S. National Park Service systematically collects data regarding its 270+ million annual recreation visits, and therefore provides an opportunity to examine how human visitation may respond to climate change from the tropics to the polar regions. To assess the relationship between climate and park visitation, we evaluated historical monthly mean air temperature and visitation data (1979–2013) at 340 parks and projected potential future visitation (2041–2060) based on two warming-climate scenarios and two visitation-growth scenarios. For the entire park system a third-order polynomial temperature model explained 69% of the variation in historical visitation trends. Visitation generally increased with increasing average monthly temperature, but decreased strongly with temperatures > 25°C. Linear to polynomial monthly temperature models also explained historical visitation at individual parks (R2 0.12-0.99, mean = 0.79, median = 0.87). Future visitation at almost all parks (95%) may change based on historical temperature, historical visitation, and future temperature projections. Warming-mediated increases in potential visitation are projected for most months in most parks (67–77% of months; range across future scenarios), resulting in future increases in total annual visits across the park system (8–23%) and expansion of the visitation season at individual parks (13–31 days). Although very warm months at some parks may see decreases in future visitation, this potential change represents a relatively small proportion of visitation across the national park system. A changing climate is likely to have cascading and complex effects on protected area visitation, management, and local economies. Results suggest that protected areas and neighboring communities that develop adaptation strategies for these changes may be able to both capitalize on opportunities and minimize detriment related to changing visitation.

Chinese Tourists’ Perceptions of Climate Change and Mitigation Behavior: An Application of Norm Activation Theory

“…Unfortunately, however, when it comes to climate change and tourism, most studies have focused on the impacts on the tourism industry [11,[36][37][38], tourism destination [19,21,39], tourism resources [14,27,40,41], and tourism policies [17,28]. In short, studies in this aspect are dominated by a tourism supply perspective.…”

Assessing the Impact of Projected Climate Change on Zoo Visitation in Toronto (Canada)

“…The climatic and visitation data retrieved for this study were all measured at the daily time scale, which enables a more accurate and precise investigation of the relationship between weather and visitation, as well as the prediction of future visitation under a changed climate, since visitors respond to the current and expected atmospheric conditions on a given day (de Freitas, 2003). Monthly and annual averages are not relative to actual visitor decision-making (de Freitas, 2003; therefore, using these course aggregate measures to model the relationship between climate and visitation and then predict future patterns of tourist behaviour Scott 2006a, 2006b;Loomis and Richardson, 2006;Scott et al 2007b;Fisichelli et al 2015), could be problematic.…”

Crowd‐sourced data reveal social–ecological mismatches in phenology driven by climate

“…; Fisichelli et al . ), our approach cannot account for such long‐term adjustments in the climate responses of either visitors or wildflowers. Moreover, the crowd‐sourced photos that we used did not allow us to directly measure visitors’ knowledge or appreciation of subalpine meadow ecosystems, or to ascertain whether these factors affect how sensitive visitors are to snow or bloom timings (an area ripe for further investigation).…”