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Recreational Ecology, Broadly
Recreational Ecology, Broadly
My work is rooted firmly in the field of recreational ecology, or the study of the impacts of human use and recreation on wilderness. "Use" in this context can take any number of forms, however, hiking and camping are the two most commonly studied, with the latter being what I eventually focused on. While recreational ecology is not a large field and doesn't possess the funding or public interest as other branches of science, it has its own beauties and features that made me fall in love with it. In particular, the newly-pioneered use of GIS analysis in research has opened the door to countless revolutionary studies for a fraction of the previous cost and it has made me excited to keep up with current research and see where the field goes next. If you want to learn more about the field, I have compiled a few relevant papers and articles here.After emailing a few people, I connected with my current mentor: Dr. Jeff Marion, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist and Adjunct Professor at Virginia Tech. Considering his extensive career in the field, I am confident that he was the perfect choice to guide me through this long process.While I was initially set on working with trails and designing a project around assessing how sustainable the Marin County trail system is and finding ways to improve it, I was steered away from this by my mentor. Zeroing in on an exact project after this was tough, as I didn't know where I wanted to go. Eventually, after reading a ton of papers and talking over all my ideas with my mentor, I found my project.
My Project!
My Project!
Simply, my project is looking at the effects of camping in the Desolation Wilderness. More specifically, I am inspecting and critiquing the currently-used system of campsite management, which is proven to be unnecessarily impactful and inefficient when compared to alternatives. Through a thorough assessment and comparison of individual campsite use levels, the excess capacity and other overarching inefficiencies are made clear. While this type of study has been done on the East Coast (on the Appalachian Trail), this will be the first of its kind done on the West Coast. By explicitly evaluating this system, we hope to present a compelling case study that wilderness management will see and take note of. We have the support of the El Dorado National Forest Service, and their guidance and deep knowledge of the area have been instrumental in our work. Our study is not groundbreaking in concept, the real value will come from its thoroughness and clarity in demonstrating a point of extreme importance. After publishing, we hope to present our findings to the Desolation Wilderness management services to create change and a lasting impact on the area.
^^ My own picture from the hike back to Echo Lake, 8/12/23
Further Connections
Further Connections
While our project is a case study designed to re-prove an already established idea to a target audience, we are also working to incorporate some amount of entirely new research. This comes in the form of a new question, which asks whether mobile phone locational data could be used as an analog to assess campsite use levels. At the moment, finding out how much use a campsite gets is a notoriously slow and labor-intensive process, however, if we were able to accurately link it to satellite phone data it would be as simple as plotting data points in GIS software. A study that finds and presents a workaround to manual data collection would be of interest to many land management agencies and scientists and could be revolutionary for the field.While this would be an excellent addition to our project, this is not our primary research focus. Neither I nor Dr. Marion are GIS experts, and it may turn out that this facet is too involved for our short-term study. See my research notebook for updates on if we end up incorporating it.
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