Recreation Ecology and Visitor Carrying Capacity Management: Implications for Protected Areas in East Asia

Ever-growing recreation, tourism and ecotourism worldwide have become a significant factor of resource degradation in many protected areas. Managers of these areas are increasingly challenged to implement policies, strategies and actions that would protect the resource base while providing quality visitor experience. One major issue in managing protected area visitations is that of carrying capacity, or the question of "how much use is too much\ulcorner". Scientific studies of visitor impacts, often known as recreation ecology, has generated a knowledge base that provides valuable input to the visitor carrying capacity management process adopted by the U.S. National Park Service. This paper aims at (a) providing an overview of recreation ecology research and its application in managing visitor carrying capacity, and (b) examining the relevance of recreation ecology to East Asian protected areas with special reference to the visitor capacity issue.ity issue.