Visitors – A Threat To Nature

We all often love exploring the nature and its beauty. We visit different places that are amongst the natural beauties of the world and learn more about these. It is very important to understand that how people make use of and experience places of great importance of the living nature. This understanding is essential for effective management and monitoring of activities of human and conservation of biodiversity.

Lately, a team of researchers assessed and studied global patterns of visitation rates, attractiveness and pressure at over 12,000 Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs), which are sites of international significance for conservation of nature, by making using of geolocated data extracted from social media platforms such as Twitter and Flickr. The study revealed that Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas that are situated in Europe and Asia, and in temperate biomes, consist of highest density of social media users. Results have revealed that sites of importance for congregatory species, which are also more easily accessible, more densely populated and are a better source of tourism facilities, has received more visitors than those sites that consist of larger number of bird species. Dr. Anna Hausmann from the University of Helsinki, who is a conservation scientist and is leading the study stated that the group has been exploring and validating data obtained from social media sources. This has helped them to understand better and in detail, people´s preferences so as to experience nature in various national parks at a local, national and continental scale. She further stated that the study is emphasizing at expanding the analysis at a worldwide level. Tourism is one of those industries that is growing at a very fast rate all over the world. The conservation areas are becoming immensely popular destinations for those people who are looking for nature-based once in a lifetime experiences. Various Important bird and biodiversity areas are reflective of some of the best places of Mother Nature all over the planet. The results have permitted the team to pinpoint that which of these sites face potentially the greatest threats or greatest opportunities as a consequence of high numbers of visitors. The social media content and metadata contains useful information for understanding human-nature interactions in space and time," stated Prof. Tuuli Toivonen, who is the leader of the Digital Geography Lab at the University of Helsinki. "Social media data can also be utilised in order to cross-validate and help enrich the data collected with the help of conservation organizations," she stated. The study revealed that around 17 percent of all Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBA) that were studied by the experts to be under larger human disturbance also had huge numbers of social media users. As a result, these sites should be a priority for management actions focussed at decreasing pressure at sites.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190523104944.htm