Balancing recreation and conservation in protected areas: the impact of human activities on carnivore populations
Carnivores play an important ecological role in regulating ecosystems. As predators, they influence the flow of energy and control the abundance of other species through interspecific interactions, such as predation and competition. Many charismatic species, such as felids, can provide direct economic benefit through tourism and have great potential to provide ecosystem services indirectly. However, carnivores are among the most persecuted species with a marked contraction of their ranges due to human disturbances, such as habitat degradation and fragmentation, prey depletion, and conflicts with human activities. Natural protected areas (NPAs), where recreational activities and tourism are becoming increasingly important, are the last available refuge for some carnivore species being essential for their persistence. Recreation and conservation in NPAs could be compatible if both activities are managed together to minimize the impacts on biodiversity. In this sense, there is a necessity to evaluate the effectiveness of different management options to meet both recreational and biodiversity conservation demands. Our objective is to assess how tourism and recreational activities potentially affect carnivore populations within two NPAs in Mendoza, Argentina: Villavicencio Private Natural Reserve and Ñacuñán Biosphere Reserve.
Villavicencio Natural Reserve is one of the NPAs, after Aconcagua Provincial Park and Puente del Inca Natural Monument, with the highest number of tourists in Mendoza, with more than 55,000 visitors per year and a wide range of recreational activities. On the other hand, Ñacuñán Biosphere Reserve has a recent and limited tourist history that began to intensify in 2010, with approximately one thousand visitors a year. These differences provide an excellent opportunity to evaluate how in different NPAs, tourism and public use management can potentially affect the populations of a group of mammals that seems to depend on these areas for their conservation. We will use camera traps and assess the use of space, densities, and activity patterns of different species of carnivores in sites and times of the year with different intensities and recreational use. We will use spatially explicit capture-recapture models to estimate species density and occupancy models for assessing habitat use. The results of our study will help with recommendations for protected areas management to reduce the impacts of tourism on wildlife and the potential risk to visitors who frequent these areas. We expect that our contributions could help to balance biodiversity conservation and recreational use in the NPAs.
Team: M. Soledad Albanese; M. Fernanda Cuevas; Claudia M. Campos; Mónica Cona; Diego Zeverini, Hugo Debandi.
Affiliation: Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas (IADIZA) CONICET Mendoza
