Walking in Each Other’s Footsteps: Do Animal Trail Makers Confer Resilience against Trampling Tourists?

Abstract

Modern humans, and other hominins before them, have walked across the landscapes of most continents for many millennia. They shared these landscapes with other large animals, especially mammalian herbivores and their predators, whose footsteps defined trails through the vegetation. Most of the diversity in the wild species is now concentrated in protected areas and visited by large numbers of tourists who may walk amongst them. This review examines the literature about medium-large animal and tourist trampling impacts to uncover any marriage between animal ecology and nature-based tourism research. Methodology is comparable. Animal ecology has focused on the propagation of grazing and trampling effects from a point source (usually water). Tourism research has focused on trail structure (formal/informal, hardened, wide/narrow) and the propagation of effects (especially weeds) into the hinterland and along the trail. There is little research to substantiate an evolutionary view of trampling impacts. At least tourists venturing off formed trails may reduce impacts by following animal trails with caveats, such as risk of encounters with dangerous animals and disruption of animal behavior. This is an under-studied topic but a fertile ground for research, aided by modern tools like trail cameras and geographically enabled devices borne by tourists.

Preface: Special Issue on Environmental Impact of Nature-Based Tourism

“…Therefore, they recommend that managers concentrate walking trails in lowland grasslands, and also recommend their methods as a time-saving procedure for similar studies in other regions. Croft [2] also discusses the problems of vegetation trampling and explores the possibility of moderating the effects of human walkers by following the trails created by large animals in Australia, Africa, and Europe, including advice on where this may not be appropriate, such as in locations where large predators await herbivores along trails. Bartoletti et al [3] discuss results of stakeholder questionnaires on the impacts of trampling and other issues, such as waste disposal by adventure racers in Brazil.…”

Impacts of Wildlife Artificial Water Provisioning in an African Savannah Ecosystem: A Spatiotemporal Analysis

“…Land 2024, 13 This saw the government of Botswana installing AWPs mainly in protected areas such as the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) [6]. In contrast, tourist enterprises have since adopted water supplementation methods to boost wildlife numbers around their premises and increase tourist visitation and satisfaction through enhanced wildlife viewing [8][9][10]. This has been noted to cause high-density aggregation of wildlife species around AWPs [8].…”

“…The concentration of some wildlife species, such as Loxodonta africana, can alter natural landscapes by causing homogenisation of foraging habitats, especially woody vegetation, thereby threatening biodiversity and ecosystem resilience [8,11,12]. However, little is known about the effects of wildlife densities on landscape changes through the utilisation of geospatial tools [12].…”

The environmental footprint of Holocene societies: a multi-temporal study of trails in the Judean Desert, Israel

“…Linear soil erosion in particular has recently been suggested to interact with the establishment of new pathways (Sidle et al, 2019). In footpaths, the process of soil compaction through trampling has been studied to some extent in recreational contexts mostly looking at the effect on the local flora (Studlar, 1980;Ayers et al, 2008;Yaşar Korkanç, 2014;Chenhao et al, 2019;Croft, 2019;Sherman et al, 2019). Other types of soil compaction have been investigated through various environments and fields, including the effects of humans, animals, and vehicles on the subsoil (Liddle, 1975;Eldridge, 1998;Boelhouwers and Scheepers, 2004;Pietola et al, 2005;Botta et al, 2020;Boardman 2022;.…”