Applications - Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications - page 290

To improve the recreational services of natural parks and protected areas,
information collected from the visitors using interviews and “listening exercise”
is important. Human voices and aircraft overflights are the major sources of visitor
concern.
The explosive increase of environmental tourism has produced a great pressure
of visitors on parks and protected areas also in remote regions, and human crowding
is an important source of concern for planners and decision makers.
Perceived crowding (PC) is a measure of the level of acoustic confidence that
tourists have after a visit. PC largely depends on the typology of park, the experi-
ence of individuals, and the context in which the evaluation is carried out. For
instance, encounters at the border of a park were more tolerated than encounters in
the core areas. To rating the quality of a park the category of tourists is a further
element of difference and visitor behavior is more important than the real density of
visitors.
Noise management is a difficult task in protected areas, largely because of the
different nature of each protected area. Physical characters, ecosystem structure and
dynamics, and fragility to human intrusion prevent the application of standardized
management. At least three main actions can be common: the separation of
conflicting activities, the reduction of noise effect, and the improvement of visitors
expectations.
To visit mountain parks in wintertime the use of snowmobiles and snowcoaches
that reduce the risk of individual trekker casualties is required. However, these
vehicles are responsible for an altered soundscape that can decrease the rating of a
protected area, as recently found by a survey conducted on a large set of visitors.
The last generation of visitors were aware of the consequence of the use of vehicles
during wintertime in the parks. The annoyance produced by snowmobiles on
visitors is confirmed also for wild animals such as wolves and elk, which have an
altered level of glucocorticoids (GCs) produced by the hypothalamic-pituitary-
adrenal axis.
Aircraft noise is an important source of disturbance, especially in parks and
protected areas, but the rating of this effect largely depends by the status of the
interviewed persons and their experiences. Visitors who consider natural quiet very
or extremely important are more sensitive to aircraft noise of 10-50 dB. Visitors
that have experienced a past visit at the same site were 20-35 dB more sensitive to
aircraft noise than other visitors. Visitors in adults-only groups were 10-20 dB
more sensitive to aircraft noise than other visitors. Finally, visitors on short hikes
were 35-70 dB more sensitive to aircraft noise.
Backcountry visitors were more sensitive to aircraft disturbance than
frontcountry visitors.
A conservation agenda for natural parks and protected areas should be based on a
reasonable trade-off between conservation of natural resources and limiting the
impact of visitors.
The reduction of inappropriate sounds seems the major mission in conserving
the wilderness of parks, but often this is not possible because of the large number of
visitors and the growing intrusions from external sources.