THE

ECOLOGICAL IMPACT OF BACKCOUNTRY RECREATION

IN

KEJIMKUJIK NATIONAL PARK

FINAL REPORT

by

R.J. Payne, Ph.D.

Professor

School of Outdoor Recreation, Parks & Tourism

Lakehead University

Thunder Bay, Ontario

P7B 5E1

rjpayne@flash.lakeheadu.ca

August, 2001

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements	ii

List of Figures	iii

List of Tables	iv

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY	v

A.	Introduction	1

B.	Literature Review	3

C.	Methodology	13

D.	The Ecological Impact of Backcountry Recreation in Kejimkujik

National Park	15

E.	Discussion and Recommendations	27

F.	References	33

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Steve Kingston, research associate on the human ecology project, for sampling design, data collection and analysis.

Angus Carr, Geospatial Inc., Thunder Bay, also deserves special thanks for his work in developing the topological network describing backcountry use.

Thanks also to Nancy Parish who assisted Steve with data collection during the 1999-2000 field season.

List of Figures

Figure 1:	The Logistic S-Curve	4

Figure 2:	Number of Visitors and Area of Obvious Impact on Campsites	16

Figure 3:	Number of Parties and Area of Obvious Impact on Campsites	17

Figure 4:	Maximum Party Size and Area of Obvious Impact on Campsites	17

Figure 5:	Number of Visitors and Area of Obvious Impact on Trail Segments	18

Figure 6:	Number of Visitors and Area of Obvious Impact on Trail Segments	19

Without TP 8 & 10

Figure 7:	Number of Parties and Area of Obvious Impact on Trail Segments	20

Without TP 8 & 10

Figure 8:	Maximum Party Size and Area of Obvious Impact on Trail Segments	20

Without TP 8 & 10

Figure 9:	Plot Sampling Design	30

Figure 10:	Station Sampling Design	31

Figure 11:	Arm Sampling Design	32

List of Tables

Table 1: Univariate Tests, Depth of Material on the Soil with all plots (MATDEP)

and with Campsites and Trail Segments (MATDEP*IMPACT)	21

Table 2: Repeated Measures Analysis, Depth of Material on the Soil

(MATDEP)	22

Table 3: Univariate Tests, Basal Area of Trees Within all Plots (TREES)and

with Campsite and Trail Segment Plots (TREES*IMPACT)	23

Table 4: Univariate Analysis, Diversity (DIVERSIT) with all plots and with

Campsite and Trail Segment Plots (DIVERSIT*IMPACT)	23

Table 5: Repeated Measures Analysis, Diversity	24

Table 6: Univariate Analysis, Plant Density with all Plots (DENSITY)

and with Campsite and Trail Segment Plots (DENSITY*IMPACT)	25

Table 7: Repeated Measures Analysis, Plant Density	25

Table 8: Univariate Analysis, Species Richness with all plots (SP RICH)

and with Campsite and Trail Segment Plots (SP RICH*IMPACT)	26

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report constitutes the results of a research project to examine the ecological impacts of backcountry recreation in Kejimkujik National Park. Measuring ecological impact focused on vegetation and obvious physical effects such as "disturbed area" at campsites and along trail segments. Variability in human use was measured by means of the national park's backcountry permitting system, using the 1995 season.

During the first field season (1998), the research team established a vegetation sampling protocol that allowed subsequent analysis by "repeated measures" procedures. Twenty plots, 10 adjacent to campsites and 10 along trail segments, were placed in Kejimkujik's backcountry areas using this sampling protocol.

In the second field season (1999), measurements of vegetation on the 20 plots established in Year 1, were completed, data were stored in computer files and preliminary analysis was begun.

More detailed analyses, including the development of a topology of visitation nodes and connecting arcs and the computation of indices of species richness and diversity, set the stage for the repeated measures analysis. The final level of analysis sounght to answer two research questions:

•	what are the relationships between backcountry travel and camping and (terrestrial) ecological impacts in Kejimkujik National Park?, and,

•	has the backcountry recreation management strategy developed by the national park staff been successful?

The repeated measures analysis revealed that human use variables (number of visitors, number of parties and maximum party size) are correlated fairly strongly with the area of obvious impact on campsites and trail segments. The number of visitors seems a particularly robust causal factor in determining the area of obvious impact, especially on campsites, but also along trail segments.

The effects of distance from campsites and trail segments were noticeable on several of the ecological variables. The variables, depth of material on the soil, plant diversity and plant density, were statistically different immediately adjacent to campsites than farther away in the plots. These distance effects did not arise along trail segments.

Adding human use variables, especially the number of visitors to campsites or using trail segments, did not yield significant statistical results, suggesting that the intensity of visitor use does not affect plant communities adjacent to the campsites and trail segments.

The report concludes that the backcountry recreation management strategy has been generally successful in focusing vegetation impacts on campsites and trails and in protecting ecological integrity in Kejimkujik National Park.

A.	Introduction

This project addresses a perennial issue in national parks - maintaining ecological integrity and biodiversity while encouraging visitor use. That this issue continues to bedevil park managers in Canadian national parks is readily apparent. Consider, for example, the most recent State of the Parks Report (Parks Canada, 1995a), in which a cause and effect link is made between facilities for visitors and threats to ecological integrity. More recently, the Banff-Bow Valley Task Force (1996) detailed in explicit fashion the relationships between heavy visitor use and reductions in biodiversity in the Bow Valley corridor of Banff National Park. Another source of critical comment is the federal Auditor-General who, in his 1996 annual report, subjected Parks Canada's operations to scrutiny (Office of the Auditor-General, 1996). Chief among the Auditor-General's concerns was the inability of Parks Canada to manage biodiversity in national parks in a satisfactory way. More recently, a subsequent State of the Parks report (Parks Canada, 1997) ranked national parks on how well each maintained ecological integrity within its boundaries; Kejimkujik National Park rated 3, indicative of a moderate decline in ecological integrity. The Report of the Panel on Ecological Integrity in Canada's National Parks (Parks Canada, 2000) represents the most recent assessment of how well the agency meets its mandate of maintaining ecological integrity. The EI Panel was critical of Parks Canada's efforts in three ways important to this report, maintaining that:

Parks Canada lacked a "culture of conservation";

Parks Canada lacked scientific capacity; and,

Parks Canada's management of human use was weak.

These criticisms cannot be allowed to overshadow progress made by Parks Canada in managing to maintain ecological integrity. Woodley (1991) and Welch (1995) both illustrate the advances made in defining ecological integrity in operational terms and the efforts to develop baseline data to anchor monitoring. In Kejimkujik National Park, ecological database development is well-
advanced (Drysdale, 1995); furthermore, the recent Park Management Plan for Kejimkujik National Park (1995b) commits park managers to protecting biodiversity. These commitments are given more specific direction in the park's draft (1998) Ecosystem Conservation Plan where coming to grips with "human ecology" is accorded high priority status under the terrestrial ecological integrity category.

However, information about park visitors does not match that which exists for species or ecosystems in national parks (Payne, 1997), a fact which represents a serious impediment to ecosystem management. The combination of natural science and social science information has become a repeated, although problematic, requirement in ecosystem management (U.S. Forest Service, 1994). One purpose of this project was to bring attention to the ecological implications of visitor use of park environments. Specifically, this research project seeks to provide an answer to the following question of carrying capacity:

What are the relationships between backcountry travel and camping and (terrestrial) ecological impacts in Kejimkujik National Park?
Staff at Kejimkujik National Park have long appreciated that recreationists might well be producing negative and long-lasting ecological impacts in the park's backcountry. Some such impacts, such as disturbed areas around popular campsites, the cutting of tree limbs for firewood and widespread "catholes" around camping sites, were obvious. Others, such as vegetative change, are less so, but staff in the national park were concerned that the more obvious impacts made the likelihood of vegetative change much higher. The observations and anecdotal evidence of user impacts led the staff to formulate a backcountry management strategy designed to minimize the impacts of backcountry camping. The strategy was composed of the following parts:

•	identification of backcountry campsites;

•	control of those sites through a permitting system;

•	establishment of tent pads and fire pits on each campsite;

•	development of a "pit privy" on each site; and,

•	supply of firewood at each designated campsite.

The intent of the strategy is clear: require people to camp at designated sites and ensure that those designated sites contained amenities that eliminate particular user behaviours that impact upon the natural environment. There would still be impacts, but those impacts would be on the designated campsites only. This research also serves to test whether the backcountry recreation management strategy developed by the staff has been successful.

B.	Literature Review

"Carrying capacity" is an attractive idea. It possesses an intuitive appeal which has lead many people to place it at the very centre of theories and prescriptions that focus on the human use of natural environments. For environmental managers especially, it promises scientific justification for difficult decisions that inevitably involve competing human interests as well as incomplete knowledge of the natural environment. U.S. researchers recently polled National Park Service managers who were responsible for backcountry management in national parks (Manning, et al., 1996). Among the problems managers reported was the deterioration of campsites and trails. The researchers went on to identify three trends:

backcountry impacts were primarily related to recreational use;

negative visitor experiences and crowding were becoming issues; and,

carrying capacity was "... a pervasive but unresolved issue" (Manning et al., 1996, pp. 144-145).

Carrying capacity within a Canadian national park context is at the heart of this document. National parks in Canada are distinctive in that while they are established to protect representative and significant natural areas of national importance, they also are expected to offer visitors opportunities to understand, appreciate and enjoy natural and cultural heritage. Managing this contradiction between protection and use is the chief enterprise of national park managers. It is in this context that carrying capacity has been considered as a management tool. A discussion and a critique of carrying capacity form the focus of this literature review.

B.1	The Idea of Carrying Capacity

Carrying capacity is an venerable idea. Modern definitions reflect the most important dimensions of the concept:

"An environment's carrying capacity is its maximum persistently supportable load" (Catton, 1986 cited in Rees, 1998); and,

"... carrying capacity ... assumes that there are a finite number of people who can be supported without degrading the natural environment and social, economic and cultural systems and, as such, 'is an indirect measure of the maximum level of stress that an ecosystem can maintain' (Barbier, Burgess and Folke, 1994)." (International Institute for Sustainable Development, 1995).

Daniel Botkin (1990, p.20), however, points out that in 1849 a Belgian scientist, Pierre-François Verhulst, first discussed the S-shaped logistic growth curve (Figure 1) that describes how a population grows to its limits. All other things being equal, those limits set the carrying capacity for

(Adapted from: Botkin, 1990, p. 20, Figure 2)

that population in that environment. The definitions cited above contain the essential kernels of Verhulst's S-curve. Each also offers other elements which have come to be accepted as part of the meaning of carrying capacity. "Load" might be numbers of people as in the second definition, but it might also be cattle, voles or sewage effluent. Going beyond an environment's carrying capacity produces a response: in the second definition, the response is the degradation of that environment. The second definition also mentions "stress" and, in doing so, introduces the causal relationship of "stress-
response", a direct and traceable cause and effect link, which forms a main theme in ecological science. Lastly, the second definition provides the significant observation that natural and social systems are interrelated: overshooting carrying capacity causes a response in the ecosystem which, in turn, affects elements of the social system.

The carrying capacity idea is implicit in a well-known writing that has become required reading in environmental science. Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" (Hardin, 1968), focused attention on the apparently inevitable abuse and resultant degradation of common property resources. Hardin's scenario contains aspects of the definitions offered earlier and also provides opportunities to learn more about the meaning of carrying capacity.

Although Hardin's original paper focused upon a single pasture, he has also applied the argument at a larger, global scale (Hardin, 1998). The question then arises: can carrying capacity be a useful framework at every scale, from a pasture to the Earth itself? Environmental scientists are comfortable working at different scales, but they recognize that shifting down the scale, from biome to eco-site, is accompanied by changes in key factors and in applicable processes (Forman and Godrun, 1986; Peck, 1998). An environmental scientist would appreciate the importance of global circulation systems in determining climatic and vegetative regimes on a continent-wide basis. However, (s)he would recognize that such globally significant factors would be of little use in understanding the variation in vegetation and moisture on a local hillside. At what scale(s) can carrying capacity be most effectively employed?

Another element of carrying capacity revealed in these two sources is the implicit understanding that what is being considered is the carrying capacity of the pasture or of the earth for some purpose. Thus, Hardin's concern is that the pasture will be ruined, that it will no longer provide good grazing for people's cattle. If it is possible to tie carrying capacity to implicit purposes or goals, then it is logical to assume that other purposes may well be associated with different carrying capacities. In other words, there may be many different versions of carrying capacity. At the very least, it is reasonable to say that a particular expression of carrying capacity must be firmly associated with a specific purpose. To discuss carrying capacity without discussing its purpose, then, would be misleading and inappropriate.

In summary, the following may be said of carrying capacity:

it can be defined as "an environment's maximum persistently supportable load";

it may be employed at a variety of scales; and,

it is always associated with a purpose or goal.

B.2	The Myths of Carrying Capacity

Attempts to measure the carrying capacity of an environment have been largely unsuccessful. Why has it been so difficult to measure carrying capacity? There are three myths or misconceptions about carrying capacity that interfere with its measurement: carrying capacity as a concept; closed versus open systems in nature; and, carrying capacity's association with purpose.

B.2.1 Carrying Capacity as a Concept

It is commonplace to find researchers writing about the carrying capacity "concept". According to Lawrence Neuman (1997, p. 39), a concept "... is an idea expressed as a symbol or in words." Neuman goes on to discuss "height", a concept which can be defined and, more importantly, measured.

Using Neuman's definition of concept, consider "ecological integrity", a concept particularly relevant to national park management. Ecological integrity is a useful concept to examine here because discussions are currently under way within Parks Canada to determine how to measure it. A recent definition1 is the following:

Ecological integrity is the condition of an ecosystem where 1) the structure and function of the ecosystem are unimpaired by stresses induced by human activity, and, 2) the ecosystem's biological diversity and supporting processes are likely to persist (Parks Canada, 1998a).

Several aspects of this definition are noteworthy. First, ecological integrity is defined as "the condition of an ecosystem"; moreover, direction is offered as to how that condition might be measured, namely through the ecosystem's structure and function. Furthermore, a focus on "persistence" enables an ecological scientist to consider the likelihood of change in the ecosystem. Each of these aspects are measurable, regardless of whether the national park is large or small, in northern or southern Canada. Agreement on the definition of ecological integrity and the means of measuring it provide researchers with a means of comparing ecological integrity from national park to national park or from zone to zone within one national park. While there may be other ways of defining and measuring ecological integrity in the literature (e.g., Anderson, 1991), they differ primarily in how ecological integrity is measured.