Long-term monitoring methods for assessing visitor impacts to mountain summits: Final report

Marion, Jeffrey; Wimpey, Jeremy; Carr, Chris

From executive summary: "This study investigated methods for assessing and monitoring off-trail visitor impacts on Acadia National Park’s Cadillac Mountain summit. The park’s subalpine summits receive high visitation due to their spectacular vistas of park and coastal scenery. Due to repeated glacial scouring, these summits have extensive bedrock exposure interspersed with relatively thin lenses of soil and vegetation. These settings readily permit off-trail hiking, but visitors repeatedly encounter and must cross the patches of soil and vegetation. Decades of off-trail traffic have removed the vegetation cover from a large but disconnected network of informal (visitor-created) trails. There are also some larger nodal areas of trampling disturbance and numerous areas of more dispersed trampling impact. The off-trail hiking and associated resource impacts have long been a concern of park managers, and they have implemented measures to reduce impacts, including the provision of formal trails, trail management actions (construction of steps, tread hardening, and trail borders), and Leave No Trace educational messaging. However, the trampling damage to subalpine soils and vegetation has persisted and the National Park Service funded this study to develop assessment and monitoring protocols to measure and track off-trail resource impacts. These protocols can be employed to monitor resource conditions over time and evaluate the efficacy of measures applied to reduce impacts or restore natural conditions. Study objectives focused on three tasks: 1) collect baseline data on recreation-related impacts to vegetation and soils on mountain 2) identify potential indicators of change and develop efficient protocols for quantifying vegetation and soil impacts, and 3) test, refine, and apply protocols to demonstrate their utility. We focused our research efforts on measurement-based assessment protocols that could be replicated with acceptable measurement error to provide data that accurately document changes in resource conditions over time. Based on our reviews of the literature and through discussions with park staff and the research team we decided to develop protocols to document visitation-related impacts through three separate but related impact assessment protocols. These included: 1) an assessment of visitor-created informal trails, 2) assessments of soil loss, and 3) assessments of land cover (vegetation/groundcover) changes. The protocols developed and applied for eachof these are fully described in the Appendices of this report and all associated data and photographs were included on a CD provided to park staff."

Long-term monitoring methods for assessing visitor impacts to mountain summits: Final report

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