Ecological Impacts of Visitor Use, Aconcagua Provincial Park, Argentina

Abstract

Protected area managers often face the challenge of conserving biodiversity while at the same time providing tourism and recreational opportunities for visitors. Popular nature based activities in more remote mountain protected areas include sightseeing, hiking and mountaineering. There are often commercial services provided to support these activities including pack animals for transport and campsite services. These, along with general visitor use, can result in a range of ecological impacts on soils, vegetation, wildlife and aquatic systems. In mountain ecosystems, impacts on vegetation are particularly important as alpine plants often have limited capacity to recover from damage due to the short growing season and poor soils. While a range of impacts from visitor use have been documented in alpine ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere, there is limited research in the Southern Hemisphere. This is particularly true for the Andes, even though they account for 13% of the world’s mountains and are increasingly popular destinations for hiking and mountaineering. Prior to this thesis, for example, there was only one Masters thesis that assessed visitor impacts in the highest protected area in the Southern Hemisphere, Aconcagua Provincial Park in the dry Andes of Argentina, despite the Park receiving over 33,000 visitors per year. Impacts of visitor use on vegetation in this Park and other protected areas in the dry Andes is of particular concern as visitor use tends to be concentrated in the few areas where vegetation is found. This includes concentrated visitor use of alpine steppe vegetation (29.5% of the Park) and alpine meadows (0.4%) in Aconcagua Park. This thesis assesses the ecological impacts of increasing visitor use of Aconcagua Provincial Park, including impacts on vegetation.