The Impacts of Recreational Trail Infrastructure an Threatened Plant Communities

Abstract

Globally, nature-based tourism and recreation is increasing. As a result there is more and more infrastructure provided to allow access to natural areas, including recreational trails used for popular activities such as mountain-biking and hiking. There are many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of trails in natural areas worldwide, but what impacts do they have on native plant communities, especially those already threatened with extinction? The first step in addressing this question involved undertaking a global systematic quantitative literature review to assess what is known and unknown about the impacts of recreational trails on vegetation and soils. The review found that of the 59 original research papers, most assessed formal trails in well-funded protected areas often looking at local-scale compositional impacts and/or trail degradation using rather location-specific, crisis-driven approaches. There were major gaps in the literature including research: (1) on threatened plant communities, (2) on temporal effects, (3) on structural and functional impacts, (4) comparing different types of trails and (5) assessing landscape-scale impacts such as fragmentation. To start to address some of these gaps, the field work component of the thesis assessed trail impacts in three contrasting threatened plant communities in Australia where trail-based recreation is popular. The aims were to determine: (1) if recreational trails damage threatened plant communities, (2) if impacts occur at direct local, indirect local and cumulative landscape scales, (3) if trails affect compositional, structural and/or functional facets of the communities and (4) if impacts vary among different types of trails.