Limiting Recreational Use in Wilderness: Research Issues and Management Challenges in Appraising Their Effectiveness

Limits on the overall number of recreationists permitted to enter or visit wilderness, national park backcountry or whitewater rivers have been formally established for about 30 years. Such limits have usually been established to protect biophysical or social conditions from unacceptable impacts in the face of rapidly rising amounts of visitation. Use limits are one of a number of tools available to managers, but represent a particularly intrusive and controversial one. Use limit policies may have significant negative displacement effects, are implemented within a regional context—even if not recognized in the decision—and must meet the criteria of effectiveness, efficacy, and efficiency in order to be useful in managing impacts. Unfortunately, evaluations of use limit policies using these criteria do not exist within the literature. The paper suggests that evaluations encompass four major domains, consider effects within a regional context, and research move from one-shot case study experimental designs to those that are more conducive to better understanding of the consequences of use limit policies. Introduction ____________________ The development of policies that limit access to recreational resources is one of the most controversial actions implemented for managing recreation on the public lands but one of the least understood. Some managers, confronted with a seemingly insatiable demand for high quality recreational opportunities occurring in magnificent natural environments with little evidence of human use and influence, have responded by restricting access to these settings through a variety of means, but frequently through a use limit policy based on a conception of an area’s carrying capacity. Implementation of a use limit policy leads to development of use rationing and allocation regimes once demand exceeds the limit. A use limit policy is a formalized regulation that restricts the number of visitors that may enter an area over a given time period—day, week, month, or season. Such policies became popular with accelerating growth of whitewater river recreation in the 1960s and 1970s. These limits were aimed at controlling or preventing impacts either to the biophysical setting or to the recreational experience. While whitewater river managers dominated the initial implementation of use limit policies, terrestrial wilderness managers have also adopted limits on recreational use. Use limits administered in terrestrial areas often come in forms different from those used on rivers (which usually involve limits on the number of groups launching per day), often featuring limited campsite availability. Regardless of the form, use limit policies remain controversial as they carry significant distributional consequences that are often viewed as unfair by visitors. Following their initial implementation in the 1970s, they were repeatedly accompanied by litigation and civil disobedience, recurrently triggered by important issues of equity. Despite their widespread application and a rapidly growing interest in many venues, questions about the efficacy of use limit policies remain. Do such policies really control, confine, or reduce impacts? Does their implementation provide for higher quality experiences? Are they the “best” way of reducing or controlling impacts? How do their positive and negative consequences compare? Since people are directly affected, how do visitors respond to them? What issues are confronted by managers when they are implemented? A large number of studies have examined visitor preference for use limit policies (see McCool and Christensen 1996 for a brief review of some of this research). In general, this research shows that when given a reason for limiting use, visitors sampled at individual areas agree to such limits— hardly a startling conclusion (see Hall, this proceedings for additional comments about such preference studies). However, such research has avoided evaluations of how visitors view the acceptability of use limit policies within the context of the potential tradeoffs between the quality of the experience (or biophysical character) and access restrictions involved. For example, mitigating biophysical impacts through a use limit policy may achieve a gain in resource quality, but comes at the expense of restricted access to the area. The extent to which visitors would perceive biophysical or social conditions so objectionable that they would find a use limit policy acceptable has not been reported in the literature. Reports evaluating the effectiveness of use limit policies in confining, controlling and reducing visitor-induced impacts do not appear in the literature. While implementation of a use limit policy raises an abundant number of managerial (Warren 1977), economic (McCool 1978), experiential (Schreyer and Roggenbuck 1978), political (Dew 1984), and philosophical issues (McAvoy and Dustin 1983), the lack of evaluative mechanisms, frameworks and reports evoke still others.