Study On The Relationship Between Recreation Impact Perception And Visitors' Experience In Forest Recreation Areas

Lots of facts in outdoor recreation development at home and abroad proved that, not only recreation activities adversely impacted on natural and social environment,but also the impacts have an negative impact on visitors'experience.The negative impact of recreation activities on environment has drew much attention of researchers, however, few researchers pay attention to the reaction of the recreation impact on the visitors' experience. Based on visitor surveys to China's first national forest park--Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, this dissertation focuses on the effect of recreation impact perception on visitors'experience integrating ecology, sociology and environmental psychology by factor analysis, cluster analysis, correlation analysis, stepwise regression analysis, path analysis,ect, and finds that:1.Type and intensity of visitors'Recreation impact perception are different based on visitors' recreation motivations and level of environmental concern.Perception to resource impact of visitors whose motivation is 'Return to Nature'is higher than others;Visitors of a higher-level environmental concern are more sensitive to vaderlism.2.Recreation impact perception has a negative relationship with overall satisfaction; recreation impact perception can affect overall recreation experience directly or indirectly.The study find that:(1) Recreation impact perception have an adverse effect on overall satisfaction,but it have a very limited predicting capability to overall satisfaction.It can explain 11.5%,6.7% of the on-season and average season visitor's overall satisfaction variance.That indicate the diversity and complication of factors influenced overall satisfaction. (2)Although perception to some type of recreation impact have no direct effect on overall satisfaction,but they will have indirect effect on it via the according satisfaction dimension; (3)Interaction between receation motivation and'social impact' perception can explain 10.% of the variance of on-season visitors'overall satisfaction.(4)Recreation impact perception may act as a mediation factor between other factors,such as recreation expectation and overall satisfaction.3.Generally,visitors can't assess the impacted intensity of environmental factors corectly.Visitors are less sensitive to impact of vegetation and soil,their assessment is higher than the actual impact intensity;however,they are more sensitive to the informal trails and litters which are evidently caused by visitors' behavior against to norm.4.Type and intensity of recreation impact perception is significantly different between on-season visitors and average season visitors. (1)Differences on recreation impact type:perception of all recreation impact of on-season visitors are higher than that of average season visitors.As to vegetation, soil and informal trails,even if the actual impacted intensity of on-season is the same as that of average season,while the perception of on-season visitors is much higher than that of average season visitors.This phenomena may be caused by the negative emotion aroused by crowding in a high use level recreation environment. (2)Perception to managerial impact of on-season and average season are the highest of all type of recreation impact.But visitors of on-season tend to be more concern about impact caused by visitors,managers or other anthropologic impact,while neglect resource impact,such as vegetation,soil and water impact.Visitors of average season are relatively more concern about resource impact,because social conflicts decrease in a low use level recreation environment.5.Visitors are strongly support to the hard and soft potentional management actions.Based on the results,this dissertation put forward an integrated recreation impact management pattern in high use level environment.Hopefully,it will be helpful to managers of China's forest recreation areas.