PhD in Geography V.V. Minenkova

Kuban State University, Russia

Admissible recreational load and restrictions for natural complexes

Natural complexes and constituent elements are significantly different from the potential resistance to recreational load. Resistance of a natural territorial complex to recreational load can be identified as ability of a complex to resist these loads up to defined restrictions beyond which there is a loss of self-renewal ability.

Average annual recreational load can be specified by the following formula:

where P(r) – a single average annual recreational load (per capita hectare average annual);

P (n) – average for the registration period single load during different seasons of a year in the working and non-working days with comfortable and discomfortable weather (person/hectare);

f (д) – average long-term number of the non-working and working days with comfortable and discomfortable weather during different seasons of a year (days).

Admissible recreational load is defined as a number of vacationers per square meters in a unit of time when no serious damage is caused to a natural complex and it continues to function as before, keeping its structure. Norms of maximum admissible load, offered by various Russian authors, strongly differ within themselves, and the absence of universal normative documents on this matter sometimes leads to serious defects when designing development of recreational landscapes.

There are many calculation methods of admissible load for various natural complexes at their mass occupancy rate. At the bottom of many Soviet researches of recreational load for natural territorial complexes there is a provision of a recreational digression proposed by N. S. Kazanskaya. This technique shows and describes 5 stages of recreational digression. The limit of natural complex resistance beyond the bounds of which irreversible alterations occur is between the 3rd and 4th stages. Accordingly, the maximum admissible load corresponds to the 3rd stage of digression. Thus, the actual load refers to the number of people who visit this landscape which leads to a state of the 3rd digression stage.

Among contemporary national researches of recreational load on the natural one, there is a well-known method of calculating admissible load maximum on recreational areas (research team of D.R. Abdullina, N.N. Maltsev, and I.M. Potravnyy):

∑_Т – an index of the natural recreational capacity of a territory, pax per ha;

М _load – an index of the maximum area load associated with human influence (number of people);

S _area – total land area, ha;

k, f, g, j, q – a system of correctional factors that take into account a degree of environmental infrastructure and recreational area development.

According to this technique, maximum admissible load is calculated per unit of area and must conform to natural recreational capacity.

Presenting an overview of the procedures for determining admissible recreational load on natural complexes, one cannot overlook a great attention paid to concentration on forest landscapes. At the same time important natural recreational resources include water bodies (natural and artificial), and the waters and coast of which are used for a variety of recreational activities: beach-related rest, wind and kite surfing, boating, hydrocycling, water skiing, sailing, yachting, various types of fishing and hunting.

At present, there is intensive and not always justified commercialization of tourist and recreational activities in aquatic territorial complexes which primarily focuses on the biological resources withdrawal, including fishing and hunting, resulting in the destruction of habitats and ecosystem degradation. This leads to involving the most valuable natural areas into economic turnover and the loss of unique natural potential. Recreational activities stimulate the intensification of changes in natural complexes. The inevitable conflict arises between use and protection of water resources and coastal areas.

Coastal recreational areas of natural and artificial water bodies are overburdened with recreational influence and need to have a restricted number of visits, as well as a system of environmental protection measures.

Load standardization on aquatic as well as on ground complexes is conducted on the basis of the results of various recreational activities effect on the components of the environment. However, its specific character is determined by the effect of the recreational activity. Thus, in case of a forest landscape the matter concerns trampling but in case of aquatic complexes it is a question of water contamination.

Recreational “supply” of some polluting substances into a water body and their general number should not lead to the excess of the certified admissible concentration limit (ACL) or hygienic regulations on these elements. Not only the “supplies” of recreational activity but also the existing concentration of these elements in a water body should be taken into account. Load standardization can be achieved by both calculations and experimentally or combining these two methods.

Being aware of the fact that there is a particular set of polluting substances for each type of recreation and knowing the content of these substances in water, we can calculate the admissible recreation load on contamination of an aquatic area using the following formula:

С_recr. + С_wat.< ACL,

where С_recr. is the concentration of a particular polluting substance coming from a particular type of recreation;

С_wat. is the concentration of the given polluting substance in a water body.

If a polluting substance comes from several kinds of recreation, the following formula is used:

∑ С_recr. + С_wat.< ACL,

where ∑ С_recr is the sum of concentration of a polluting substance coming from a number of recreations, С_wat. is the concentration of a polluting substance in a water body.

Recreation load (Da) can be calculated using the following relations:

,

where V is the volume of a shallow part of a water body with the depth up to 2m adjacent to a beach area.

W_recr. is the total mass of polluting substances coming from all the tourists (of this recreation type). It is calculated as follows:

W_recr. = С₁Na,

where С₁ is the supply of the given polluting substance from one tourist,

Na is the number of tourists in an aquatic area.

Recreation load on aquatic complexes can be also estimated as coastal complexes load in terms of the measuring units head per hectare of aquatic area (in case of bathing) or boat per hectare (table 1).

Table 1 – Admissible anthropogenic recreation load (head per hectare) on a water body.

Type of a water body	Criterion
	technological	psychological
Defined water area for bathing (in shallow waters, with the change of swimmers)	300-500	100-200
Defined water area for going by: rowing boats (2 persons in a boat)	2-5	0,5
motor boats and water skis	0,5-1	1 (per 10-20 hectare)
sail boats	1-2	1 (per 5-10 hectare)
Space for tent camps placement at the seaside (persons per kilometer)	250-300	15-30

While estimating the holding capacity of the water area for sailing, it is also essential to consider the technological and psychological criteria of recreational load. Thus, for instance, 1-2 sail boats are technologically admissible per 1 hectare, while the psychological comfort requires the range of 5-10 hectares per each boat.

While locating holiday camps and camping sites on the banks of water bodies, it is recommended to take into account the rate of the admissible recreational load along the coastline depending on certain ecosystems. Anyway, the amount of holiday-makes cannot exceed 200 people per 1 km of coastal area.

Besides, it is necessary to consider the load on sea bank landscape which results in the negative consequences of dune cuts-off created by recreational enterprises so as to improve access to the beach area.

The utilization process of coastal territories for recreational purposes has to comply with the principles of ecological recreational environment preservation. Recreational planning is to provide their stability with the assigned recreational load. The studies of popular tourist water areas point out that the existing load often exceeds the admissible range. Thereby, it is necessary to establish the main principles and take a number of measures so as to preserve and control the coastal area resistance to recreational influence. It is possible to provide ecological-recreational safety only by means of a set of legal, scientific-technical, ecological-landscape, economic and educational measures.

In order to efficiently maintain coastal territories in a recreationally appropriate condition, it is possible to take basic security steps – primarily, to preserve biogeocenoses by means of fencing a shore sector for the period of grass layer restoration as long as the elements of root phytocenosis are conserved.

For the last decades an onward process of the priorities change in the sphere of admissible recreational load estimation has been evident. As an alternative to traditional methodology based on the quantitative approach, there is a tendency to resort to the method based on determining a qualitative scope of admissible landscape variations. The outcome of this is a set of managerial decisions which allow not only to sustain landscape and biological diversity of the territory, but also contributes to the further development of touristic-recreational environmental management.

thus, the mathematical approach is being replaced by the administrative approach, which in the first place implies planning long-term goals and tasks, a range of recreational facilities, types and forms of recreational activities, different models of recreational development rather than just planning the number of tourists and holidaymakers. The basis of such planning lies in analyzing the demand for recreational services, the tourists’ impact on the ecosystems, etc.

Overall, the above-mentioned approach is manifested in the admissible variations scope methodology. In some way this methodology presents an alternative for the admissible recreational load methodology. As we can see, the main index in the admissible load methodology is the admissible number of visitors at a time unit per unit area, whereas in the admissible variations scope methodology we rely on ultimate variations of the given landscape as the main index. At the same time, the admissible variations scope methodology makes it possible to switch from the conventionally addressed and ambiguously solved problem of determining quantitative load to solving the problem of determining the quality of those natural settings which should be conserved in the protected area.

References

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