Walk on the Wild Side: Estimating the Global Magnitude of Visits to Protected Areas

How often do people visit the world's protected areas (PAs)? Despite PAs covering one-eighth of the land and being a major focus of nature-based recreation and tourism, we don't know. To address this, we compiled a globally-representative database of visits to PAs and built region-specific models predicting visit rates from PA size, local population size, remoteness, natural attractiveness, and national income. Applying these models to all but the very smallest of the world's terrestrial PAs suggests that together they receive roughly 8 billion (8 x 109) visits/y-of which more than 80% are in Europe and North America. Linking our region-specific visit estimates to valuation studies indicates that these visits…

• WC
  Wildlife Conservation Society
• MO
  Ministry of Environment
• UF
  U.S. Forest Service
• IC
  Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade