| 英文摘要: | Protected natural areas, such as national parks and local preserves, are the primary strategy for conserving the world's biological diversity. Protected areas also provide important health and economic benefits to human communities, for example, through outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism. Visitation to protected areas is thought to be associated with public support for conservation; in other words, people will not care about protected areas, or the wildlife that depend on them, if they do not visit them. This project will test the hypothesis that visiting a protected natural area leads to pro-conservation behaviors, or people engaging in specific actions that lead to successful conservation of ecologically-important lands and species. The researchers will collect in-person and web-based survey data from visitors to Adirondack Park in northern New York, and field data on the effects of visitations on the park's bird communities. Results of the project will increase our understanding of how visitor activities affect biological communities, how changes in biological communities affect protected area integrity, how protected area integrity affects visitor experiences, and how visitors' experiences affect their conservation related behaviors. This research will provide training and educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and will inform policies to manage protected lands and wildlife. Outreach engages citizen scientists and includes public seminars, meetings with land and wildlife managers, and press releases to media outlets.
Using an integrative socio-ecological approach and experimental treatments, the project will investigate the dynamic human-environmental interactions that result from people's visitation of protected areas. Researchers will employ additive treatments of instructional (e.g., environmental education) and experiential (e.g., citizen science) activities for visitors to the Adirondack Park in northern New York. They will conduct social surveys to assess the effects of visitor activities on place attachment and ecological literacy, and subsequently, on intentions to engage in pro-conservation behaviors. These social surveys will be paired with field surveys and geospatial analyses to document multi-scale ecological integrity of bird communities in relation to varying intensities of human activity. The researchers will analyze the collected data within a coupled human-environmental model of protected area visitation to understand how visitor activities affect biological communities, how changes in biological communities affect the health and function of a protected area, how protected-area integrity affects visitor experiences, and how visitors' experiences affect their behavioral intentions regarding conservation. |