Explorar recursos

This paper focuses on the development of a systematic data collection effort that allows managers to better understand the visitors to marine resource areas managed by NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries (NMS). Through the National Marine Sanctuary Visitor Counting Process (NMS-COUNT), resource managers will gain valid and reliable data and data collection methodologies to advance predictive capability and understanding of visitors. While various federal and state agencies and Coastal Treaty Tribes collaborate in the management of coastal and marine areas, there is little compatibility in methods for estimating visitation. The NMS-COUNT process offers an iterative framework that allows local management and stakeholders to contribute to the understanding of visitor use at an NMS unit throughout each phase of the process. Building off the Interagency Visitor Monitoring Framework, the NMS-COUNT process focuses on visitation estimates and direct communication with managers and researchers to develop and implement the most efficient methodology.

This review presents a summary of existing visitor monitoring methods and relevant studies in land and marine-based areas, with a focus on the application to unique aquatic settings. Various opportunities and challenges exist with respect to the use of each method in different marine settings. These methods differ in terms of the complexity, costs, level of accuracy, and detailed information they provide. Furthermore, the feasibility of applying these methods also depends on the site attributes of a marine area. Since each marine area varies in geographical scale and environmental and social conditions, some methods will be more appropriate or perform more successfully than others in a particular location. Therefore, the consideration of these methods should be part of a proposed alternative process, focused on adaptive monitoring that scales to address visitor ebbs and flows in these aquatic areas. The proposed alternative seeks to develop consensus around quantitative goals for visitor monitoring and estimating techniques in marine settings, using a customizable mix of methods and techniques. This alternative effort progresses to subsequent tasks and discussions, and recommendations are made considering the feasibility and confidence of using these methods in particular marine settings and future pilot sites.