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Abstract |
In last three decades, the volume of published literature, acknowledged that wilderness and protected areas play an important role in natural ecosystem conservation and provision of wide variety of goods and services necessary for sustaining the wellbeing of human community in general. Increased demand of society for participation in outdoor recreational activities during the leisure time, to date, instigate a number of scholars and community initiatives to focus their attention on promotion of protected natural settings as key “units” for the enhancement of human physical and mental health . As protected area visitors do not represent one homogenous group, it therefore, seems crucial to provide park managers understandable empirical evidences about whether and to which extent visitors differ in terms of willingness to engage in different physical activities levels. Despite that similar investigations have been conducted, the majority of them were focused on visitors to urban parks than wilderness and protected natural settings. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to segment the visitors to five protected natural areas in Cataluña (Spain), by their motivation to engage in physically challenging activities and then after to examine the influence of socio-demographic, trip, motivational and attitudinal descriptors on segmentation membership. |
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