Treesearch

Scenes of natural areas were used as stimuli to analyze the psychological and physiological responses of subjects while viewing wildland scenes. Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan 1995) and theorized components of restorative environments were used as an orientation for selection of the visual stimuli. Conducted in Taiwan, the studies recorded the psychophysiological responses of 110 laboratory participants while viewing 12 images that hypothetically represented the Being Away, Extent, Fascination, and Compatibility components of restorative environments. Psychological responses were...

The Three Rivers Project in the Yukon, Canada, aims to protect a magnificent but little known 30,000 km2 (11,583 miles2) wilderness in the Peel watershed, using the tools of science, visual art, literature, and community engagement. After completing ecological inventories, conservation values maps, and community trips on the Wind, Snake, and Bonnet Plume rivers, the Yukon chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) embarked on the Three Rivers Journey in 2003. First Nations, community participants, nationally selected artists, writers, scientists, photographers and...

Human waste disposal is a health concern in many backcountry areas. This study measured Clostridium perfringens in beach sediments of Prince William Sound, Alaska, to detect fecal contamination resulting from intertidal disposal. Analysis involved holding times that exceeded eight hours. In repeatedly sampled stored sediments, C. perfringens did not decay for 101 days, indicating its reliability for detecting fecal contamination when stored. Fecal contamination was not detected in sediments while campers practiced intertidal disposal. Concentrations of C. perfringens at beach campsites did...

The fundamental flaw of the National Marine Sanctuaries Act is its lack of a singular focus on preservation. This conclusion is all the more obvious when it is compared to the Wilderness Act, enacted just eight years before. The stated objective of the Wilderness Act is to preserve roadless areas of “untrammeled” wilderness. More than 675 wilderness areas in 44 states have been designated under the Act’s auspices. The Wilderness Act has proved to be an effective conservation and management tool because it established: a clear national policy to preserve wilderness; a specific and practical...

This paper explores a value specification option to better meet a core information need in protected area management for recreation and conservation. It does not debate the meaning or definition of values, but instead identifies a perspective on values that is aimed at meeting practical conservation management needs. The first part of that perspective involves extracting from the wider values discourse some working pragmatic definition of what ‘Conservation Values’ are. The second involves clarifying how the priority attributes and features of conservation values could be considered...

The 2003 International Year of Freshwater highlighted the critical current and future scenario, on a global scale, of scarcity of adequate water—the essential need for all living things. About 40 percent of the world’s population currently have moderate to high water stress, and it is estimated that by 2025 about two-thirds of the world will live in areas facing such water stress.Within a given climate and physiographic situation, the human land use (or lack of it, as in wild lands) strongly influences the available quantity and quality of water. After briefly discussing the impacts of...

This paper describes an approach to understanding human relationships with public lands and considering those relationships in the decision making process. This understanding is based on segmentation analysis to identify groups of local residents that have similar relationships to place (RTP) with a public wildland. The research described in this paper uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to describe local relationships to place and the salience of management issues to people living in proximity to public wildlands.

This paper presents preliminary findings on a cash and contingent valuation (cv) experiment. The study replicates major elements of an earlier (1990) experiment, which solicited hypothetical and actual donations to benefit instream flows for Montana fisheries. Extensions of the earlier work include: repeat contacts to increase response rate, follow-up of the contingent valuation question to explore respondent certainty, and several question format treatments (payment card, as in the original study, and dichotomous choice). The sample populations are subsamples of licensed Montana resident...

With increasingly limited resources, conservation planners are challenged to provide policymakers with conservation portfolios that: 1) are representative of all important biodiversity features, 2) incorporate socioeconomic data, 3) are flexible to change, 4) require less financial resources over the long term, 5) overcome substantial information gaps, and 6) are developed across disciplines to maximize efficiency and stakeholder buy-in. The practice of setting priorities for conservation in a largely undisturbed region differs greatly from methods commonly applied to highly disturbed,...

The word “wilderness” is beset by a tangle of meanings. This “knot” is made of five strands: philosophical, political, cultural, justice and exploitation. Wilderness has a unique philosophical position—being disliked by both Modernism and Postmodernism. Eight key criticisms of wilderness are identified, and two different meanings discussed—“wasteland” and “large natural intact area” (here shortened to “lanai”). Participatory action research (PAR) is used with the Blue Mountains Wilderness Network near Sydney. Eleven in-depth interviews with scholars and critics of wilderness fed into the...