Public recreation and landscape protection- Hand in hand with visitor monitoring

Policy makers and managers of natural areas have to deal with competing socio-economic and environmental interests. The planning and management of these areas depends on accurate and sufficiently detailed information. Data from long-term monitoring are essential for assessing visitor impact on natural resources, facility planning, budgeting, calculating the economic contribution of tourism, and estimating the economic value of recreation experiences. In this paper we present an overview of different visitor monitoring techniques and the way they can be used drawing upon our experiences with monitoring projects in different areas in the Netherlands. We show that long-term monitoring is the basis, and that a suitable approach depends on the questions at hand, the resources available and the characteristics of the area