Visitor Monitoring & Gateways Raoul Beunen Land Use Planning Group - Wageningen University Gen. Foulkesweg 13, 6703 BJ Wageningen,The Netherlands Tel. +31 317 48 3552 Fax +31 (0)317 482166 Raoul.Beunen@wur.nl Why visitor monitoring? The purpose of this paper is to give a short overview of the results of two visitor monitoring projects and to describe possibilities to monitor the recreational use of nature areas and more specific the use of gateways. Many people visit the countryside and nature reserves, especially in the weekends. A wide range of leisure activities takes place in rural areas, for instance walking, cycling or mountain biking. All these activities, and especially the car traffic they cause, have impacts on the environment, rural residents and the enjoyment of the countryside by other users. Traffic volumes in rural areas keep growing. This growth is partially caused by urban dwellers visiting the countryside by car. Traffic congestion and parking problems at rural attractions are of increasing concern. The values for which many people like to visit rural areas, like silence and solitude, are threatened by this growing number of visits. The expression “loving a place to death” verbalises this contradiction. Many people are convinced that action needs to be taken to minimise the negative impacts of the car traffic caused by rural tourism activities. If only to maintain the attractiveness of the countryside for these leisure activities. Managers of natural areas and policy makers involved, have to deal with competing socio- economic and environmental interests. Good planning and management in nature areas depends on accurate and sufficiently detailed information. Loomis (2000) argues that data from long-term monitoring are essential for assessing visitor impact on natural resources, facilities planning, budgeting, calculating the economic contribution of tourism, and estimating the economic value of the recreation experience to the visitor themselves. Information about the number of visitors could contribute to the future development of recreational facilities. What kind of information is required? Visitor management requires knowledge of these visitors. Basically, information is required about visitor profiles, their activities, the distribution of use in the area, duration of the visits, the distribution of visitor numbers in time, expenditure, satisfaction, motives and visitor needs. In surveys many other questions can be asked, depending on the local situation and specific problems or solutions in the area. Visitor monitoring consists of two components: (1) visitor counting and (2) visitor profiling. Visitor counting is necessary to collect data about visitor flows in time and space, while visitor profiling gives more insight in the background of the visitors. How can data be collected? The Landuse Planning Group of Wageningen University has a long-time experience with the collection of visitor use data. Recently visitor counts were conducted in the Posbank area and for the “gateway” study a visitor survey was held at the Nunspeet transfer point. The Posbank is a nature area north of Arnhem. Between November 2002 and October 2004 we have counted vehicles at the three entrance roads of the area. In this period, about 500.000 incoming cars and 1.000.000 car-borne visitors have been counted. In Nunspeet the first Veluwe Transfer point has been opened in 2002. This summer we have conducted a visitors survey among car-borne visitors. The experiences from these projects are used to describe the possibilities for data collection.