Сибирский лесной журнал (Feb 2020)
Experience in evaluating and monitoring the recreational impact on forest ecosystems (on the example of a coniferous-broadleave forest surrounding Kravtsovskiy waterfalls)
Abstract
Recreational activities on natural territories put great pressure on ecosystems with the human impact being very uneven. The paper reports on experience of analyzing and monitoring the recreational impact on the forest area of the Kravtsovskiy waterfalls in the south of the Russian Far East. Autumn weekends have been found to show the highest attendance of Kravtsovskiy waterfalls with hundreds of people coming to relax there. Forest ecosystems have been revealed to experience heavy recreational impact. An effective way to conserve and to use this territory rationally is to include it into the structure of a national park or reserve. The recreational impact on the ecosystem should be evaluated and monitored at different levels. At the level of the considered territory as a whole (it may be a macro-landscape or a meso-landscape in natural or arbitrary boundaries) the most important tool is a map of the digression stages, which is a fairly simple model of the territory, but it is a good basis for characterizing, assessing and monitoring the state of the ecosystem and the recreational impact on it. Trails and picnic sites are representative areas of maximum impact of holidaymakers on this map. At the level of individual biogeocoenoses or biogeocoenotic parcels, in particular for trails and sites, ecologic-coenotic transects (profiles) should be used for detailed phytoindication of recreational impact. As indicators one can choose all plants or, e. g., only adolescents of tree species. Indicator parameters of plant species (abundance, height, vitality, ecological-coenotic features, recreational pressure tolerance) allow us to identify areas in different digression stages within the transect and biogeocoenosis as a whole.
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