Visitor monitoring in the Gesäuse National Park 2008

The National Park Gesäuse GmbH commissioned the Institute for Landscape Development, Recreation and Nature Conservation at the University of Natural Resources in February 2008 to carry out a visitor monitoring in the Gesäuse National Park.
These surveys are intended to provide a basis for the visitor management concept developed by Zechner (2007) for the Gesäuse National Park. In order to be able to implement efficient management measures, concrete knowledge of the
Visitor quantity, composition, structure, distribution and also about attitudes, motifs and characteristics of visitors are necessary. For this purpose, visitor surveys and visitor censuses were carried out in the winter months from 2007 to 2008 and in the summer months 2008.

The main objectives of the project were the initial reception of visitor structures, the recording of the role of the national park for the visit, the recording of the acceptance of management measures, the comparison of visitor structures from the winter with that of the summer, the creation of indicators on recovery quality as a contribution to the visitor guidance concept (based on the Visitor Experience and Resource Protection (VERP) framework), the creation of basic principles for a projected overall visitor narrative and the creation of a comparative basis for subsequent surveys to identify changes in the visitor structure.

The resulting contents of visitor monitoring were fir development of a detailed concept for visitor monitoring in 2008, the fixing of the survey sites through joint on-site inspections, the determination of the survey processes (counts, surveys), the definition of questionnaire content and indicators on recovery quality and the presentation for the continuation of visitor monitoring in 2009.

Note: an abbreviated version is available as a publication on the web (see web link)