Psycological Carrying Capacity

The concept of Tourism Carrying Capacity (TCC) was considered weapon of environmentally sensitive areas'management, and it encouraged managers to solve the problem of tourists'use only by limitting the number of visitors. However, used in outdoor recreation management, we should consider ecological, social and psychological capacity to increase the accuracy of assessment. Recently, domestic tourism demand is increasing, various types of area seriously overload, the quality of visitors'recreation experience declined. It proposed a lot of attention from managers and scholars, and turn back to consider tourist'psychological capacity by demand. As the only volume from the user's point of the concept of carrying capacity, the scientific assessment of Psycological Carrying Capacity is an extremely important but overlooked link in the framework of assessment of carrying capacity. The incicators of assessment of Psycological Carrying Capacity are satisfaction, perceived of crowding, visitor density and perception of environmental impact and so on. Satisfaction was widely used as the indicator in domestic (Zhou Nian-xing,2003; Li Rui,2007), mainly assessed based on the impact of use on visitors'experience or the degree of change. As result of itself subjective and arbitrary, satisfied was gradually be replaced by the perception of crowding. Most of the studies showed that perception of crowding was a good assessment indicator for Psycological Carrying Capacity (Manning,1996; Lin Yan-zhou,2000), but has not been used in domestic tourism study.Therefore, this research was aimed at building the evaluation model of Psycological Carrying Capacity, taking Xixi National Wetland Park as the research object, using the perception of crowding as an indicator to estimate the Psycological Carrying Capacity.Two methods was implemented to estimate the Psycological Carrying Capacity:(1) fitting regression cure of the perception of crowding and total number of visitors and groups; (2) establishing the crowding norms of visitors. The Jackson's (1965) "The return-potential Model" will be adapted to detect the tourists crowding norms, and applied to quantify the Psycological Carrying Capacity of Xixi Wetland. The study also discussed five factors affecting visitors'perception of crowding from the personal characteristics, encounter situations, encounters' characteristics, environmental factors and activity characteristics.A purposive sample survey of tourists was carried out, with total of 198 valid questionnaires received. Compared of two different method of measuring Psycological Carrying Capacity, available results are as follows:(1) tourists are most willing to accept the total number of visitors is 1-100, more than 501-800 people can not be accepted, and the minimum standard deviation are exists in 301-500 people, and the norm crystallization is the strongest, that is the perception of crowding of total tourists is most significant when there are 301-500 total visitors, and the norms are highest recognized;(2) the total number of 1-5 groups is most acceptted, more than 6-10 groups is not acceptable, and the the minimum standard deviation exists in groups of 11-15, and the norm crystallization is the strongest, that is, the perception of crowding of total number of groups is most significant when there are 11-15 groups, and the norms are highest recognized.According to the survey results, the more the total number of visitors and groups tourists perceived, the stronger their perception of crowding, the lower acceptance. It is the first time that the total number of groups was considered as a basis of measurement of carrying capacity. The research has discussed the Psycological Carrying Capacity of Xixi Wetland with two aspects of the total number of visitors and groups, with the result of up to 729 total number of tousits and 6 groups that can be accepted by tourists. This will not only break out the limit of total tourists by domestic management of tousim carrying capacity, and also hope to draw attention to the number of groups from managers. In addition, the study also found that environmental factors of Xixi Wetland such as transport facilities, wetland management, imperfections and other tourism activities of visitors can also significantly affected the perception of crowding of the visitors, it also shows to be feasible to expand carrying capacity of the area that by increasing the management quality of the area and guide the behavior of visitors.