Training

See also: Managing Visitor Use in Natural Areas, Sustainable Human Systems

Overview

This two-day course helped coastal resource managers, protected area managers, local decision-makers, and planners learn how to better understand, monitor, and manage visitor use to maintain quality resource conditions and visitor experiences. During this program, participants obtained the knowledge, skills, and tools to identify and define unacceptable visitor use impacts, and to apply strategies and tactics that can be used to address them. 

Description

When it comes to managing visitor use, have you ever wondered: How can I be sure I’m addressing the “real” visitor use issue? How can I justify management action? What are effective measures that can help me understand the extent of the issue? This workshop helped to answer these and other questions about managing visitor use in protected areas.

Providing a meaningful visitor experience can be at odds with protection of fragile coastal resources. This course helped participants understand, monitor, and manage visitor use to maintain healthy resource conditions and high-quality visitor experiences. This training introduced participants to a step-by-step decision-making process used to identify unacceptable visitor use impacts and explore a range of helpful strategies and tactics to address them.

By attending this workshop, participants learned how to:

• Recognize the human dimensions of coastal and marine management
• Apply recreation and visitor use management planning frameworks
• Identify visitor use issues, including visitor-resource and visitor-visitor impacts
• Craft a clear problem statement
• Develop measurable indicators for monitoring impacts and set standards for impact acceptability
• Implement visitor use monitoring methods and management strategies and tactics

The course combined lecture, interactive group discussion, and small group exercises. Additionally, each day we had a regional case study presentation. Amy Palkovic, an ecologist with California State Parks in Monterey, informed a discussion about her agency’s efforts to exclude visitor use of sensitive natural areas. The second case study was presented by BLM staff person Jodie Robb Nelson: “Reconciling high demand use of public lands with protection of fragile coastal resources at Piedras Blancas Outstanding Natural Area.”  Along with these two case studies, the workshop and its exercises also provided participants a chance to explore other region-specific visitor use issues.

Instructors Pam Kylstra and Dr. Chris Ellis are trainers associated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office for Coastal Management. Biographies are on this website.

**if you would like for us to host this workshop again, please let us know- when we get enough requests, we'll ask for NOAA's trainers to help out, again!