Managing social value from mountain tourism with spatially explicit scenarios

The recreational and natural amenities provided by public lands in the Southern Rocky Mountains of North America draw millions of visitors each year from the surrounding region, the United States, and around the world.... [ view full abstract ]

The recreational and natural amenities provided by public lands in the Southern Rocky Mountains of North America draw millions of visitors each year from the surrounding region, the United States, and around the world. Visitation numbers are projected to increase significantly in the coming decades, making it important that managers of these public lands have access to tools that allow them to consider plausible, spatially explicit scenarios that can inform decisions on how to accommodate this growth sustainably. Effective planning for future growth in tourism to these areas will require managers to evaluate how changes to the underlying landscape—whether they be planned expansions of trail networks and ski areas or the result of natural disasters such as wildfire—could alter the perception of how and where these lands are valued by actual and potential visitors. Identifying possible outcomes of these changes could assist managers in anticipating where and what future conflicts or synergies between visitors’ perceived values and management priorities might arise. To test our approach for implementing scenarios to support sustainable management practices, we developed spatially explicit, future scenarios of land-use change using the GIS tool, Social Values for Ecosystem Services (SolVES; http://solves.cr.usgs.gov). SolVES uses combinations of environmental data layers and social survey responses to derive maps indicating locations of relative, perceived values ascribed to landscapes by residents, visitors, or other stakeholders. Arapaho, Roosevelt, Medicine Bow-Routt, White River, and Pike and San Isabel National Forests in Colorado and Wyoming served as our study area. Through modifications to environmental data layers based on plausible land use and projected visitation change scenarios through the year 2060, we generated a series of maps for each forest, which estimated changes in spatial distributions and relative magnitude of perceived values for recreation and aesthetics. We also evaluated the spatial coincidence between changes in these values to better understand potential trade-offs between them under a given scenario. Spatially explicit scenarios such as those we developed hold great promise for managers who must continually plan for and adapt to the demands of increasing mountain tourism while also preserving the resources and services these landscapes provide.