CNH-S: Experimental Investigation of the Dynamic Human-Environmental Interactions Resulting from Protected Area Visitation

自然保护区，如国家公园和地方保护区，是保护世界生物多样性的主要战略。保护区还为人类社区提供重要的健康和经济利益，例如通过户外娱乐和以自然为基础的旅游。参观保护区被认为与公众支持保护有关；换句话说，如果人们不去保护区，他们就不会关心保护区，也不会关心依赖保护区的野生动物。这个项目将检验这样一个假设，即参观自然保护区会导致支持保护的行为，或者人们参与具体的行动，从而成功地保护了具有生态重要性的土地和物种。研究人员将从纽约北部阿迪朗达克公园的游客那里收集面对面的和基于网络的调查数据，以及游客对公园鸟类群落影响的实地数据。该项目的研究结果将增加我们对游客活动如何影响生物群落、生物群落变化如何影响保护区完整性、保护区完整性如何影响游客体验以及游客体验如何影响其保护相关行为的理解。这项研究将为本科生和研究生提供培训和教育机会，并将为管理受保护土地和野生动物的政策提供信息。外联活动由公民科学家参与，包括公共研讨会、与土地和野生动物管理者的会议，以及向媒体发布新闻稿。该项目将采用综合社会生态学方法和实验方法，调查人们访问保护区所产生的动态人与环境的相互作用。研究人员将对纽约北部阿迪朗达克公园的游客采用教学（例如，环境教育）和体验（例如，公民科学）活动的附加处理。他们将进行社会调查，以评估游客活动对地方依恋和生态素养的影响，并随后评估参与支持保护行为的意愿。这些社会调查将与实地调查和地理空间分析相结合，以记录与不同强度人类活动相关的鸟类群落的多尺度生态完整性。研究人员将在保护区游客的人-环境耦合模型中分析收集到的数据，以了解游客活动如何影响生物群落，生物群落的变化如何影响保护区的健康和功能，保护区的完整性如何影响游客体验，以及游客的体验如何影响他们对保护的行为意图。

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.