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Abstract |
Over the last decades, recreational uses in Natural & Protected Areas (N&PA) have increased largely all over the world, requiring extra efforts among staff and management teams of these territories to deal with this reality. In many places, nature conservation has somehow even been replaced by tourism management due to social and economic factors altogether with the massification of visitors. Modern lifestyles have contributed to this situation where visitation peaks concentrate within short periods such as Holy Week, summer, or winter vacations depending on local culture and social habits. Quite often these visitation peaks largely exceed any ecological or social carrying capacity becoming a delicate subject to deal with, reducing in many cases the administration of N&PA to the management of visitors crowds and traffic.One of the situations that happen due to overuse is the proliferation of trails that can lead to ecological and soil impacts from erosion, roots/bare rock exposure to changes of species, or habitat fragmentation, among others. Even in N&PA with a well-structured trails network, the proliferation of variants of trails and paths can easily happen, becoming a serious problem for managers due to its ecological impacts but also due to risk and safety issues for visitors/users. Keeping tracking and monitoring trails proliferation is a demanding task, where technology such as high-resolution imagery or digital elevation models can provide a huge help. Nevertheless, although these data sources become more affordable and widely available they might not work for all places. In this paper, we discuss the use of smart data and technologies as a potential tool to provide new insights on how to deal with this issue by taking advantage of web-share platforms and a myriad of GPS tracks – what can be acknowledged as an advantage of modern uses of N&PA. |
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