Managing Tourist Time-Space Movements in Recreational Areas. A comparative study of a protected natural park in the French Alps and the « De Hoge Veluwe ». Dutch National Park using the same methodology

Activities that concern tourism are a source of economic development for regions having attractive areas, either due to natural or cultural resources, but it may also endanger fragile environments. Evaluating and preventing over a long period of time the environment from the consequences of tourist activities is a major task. A better knowledge of spatial distribution and frequent usage over time of such areas can give evidence to phenomena like saturation, and give clues to understand what controls individual choices and/or typical collective itineraries. We present two studies based on an survey that combines information on: - the perception and the motivation of tourist practices, - a graphical representation of a trajectory in the tourist area that includes time period information. The first study concerns natural protected areas in the French Ardèche mountains and Northern Alpine Mountains (France). The second study concerns the Dutch National Park "De Hoge Veluwe" and the Kroller-Muller Museum (and its famous Van-Gogh paintings). By comparison, we show that a statistical analysis combined with a time-space oriented GIS (CDV-TS system) prove to be in both cases a powerful tool for recreational areas managers. The resulting information produced is related to symbolic systems based on practices and observed use of time-space. A principle of the CDV-TS system (Cartographic Data Visualizer for Time- Space data) is to give the user an access to data on tourist itineraries in a fully dynamic computing environment. The user selects items (e.g., type of hikers, type of day, type of motivation: such categories are defined from a previous statistical treatment) and visualises the selected list of existing itineraries. A temporal selection is also possible among the itineraries, either at a given time, or on periods of time during the day. The main results or concerns are: • from a fundamental point of view, the interest of developing new tools for both temporal and spatial data that will lead to new hypotheses; • from an operational point of view, the necessity of long term decisions on the development of such areas: insufficiently exploited resources, inappropriated uses, and simulation of consequences of controlling individual behaviour on areas.