In the Field with Peter Newman, Ph.D.

Next week, the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics will publish its Annual Report for 2009. If you subscribe to our eNews, you can access a copy there or just check out our Media Center at LNT.org. The report contains project and donor profiles, audited 2009 financial information, and updates on Leave No Trace research and programs. A preview profile is below:

Peter Newman, Ph.D., is Associate Dean of Academics at the Warner College of Natural Resources at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado and also serves on the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics’ Board of Directors. Dr. Newman’s research focuses on the human dimension of natural resource management and social carrying capacity decision making of protected areas management. He currently has research underway at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, and recently talked to Susy Alkaitis about his work.

Susy Alkaitis: How did you begin your work with Leave No Trace?

Dr. Peter Newman: I was an instructor at the Yosemite Institute and became a Leave No Trace Trainer. Eventually, I became a park ranger because I found that I was really interested in the relationship between use and impact, and how best to manage it. I first studied the Human Dimensions of the Wilderness Experience in the Adirondacks and then in 2002, completed my Ph.D. in Natural Resources at the University of Vermont.

SA: Scientifically, what developed from there?

PN: I was particularly concerned with the human dimension of the wilderness experience, and peoples’ relationships to parks and protected areas. So I began working on studies that explored that.
Now, we I have a whole research program that looks at visitor capacity in parks and protected areas. Visitor capacity in this case is the balance of human use and protection of wildlands. We often define visitor capacity as having 3 dimensions, the social conditions, such as the number of people in a place and perceptions of crowding, the resource conditions such has the ecological resistance and resilience of an area as well as the managerial, such as the management intensity of an area, from hardened trails to trail-less areas.

SA: What is Leave No Trace’s role?

PN: Leave No Trace is vitally important to managing visitor capacity. The behavior of visitors will dictate the amount of use that an area can accommodate. If every visitor were savvy in the LNT principles, areas could probably accommodate more use with less impact. The principles are designed to limit the impact that we see as a result of increasing use.

SA: Have any themes emerged in your research?

PN: A great example has been our work in the protection of “soundscapes” which is the study of the acoustic environment. More and more, people want to get away and our studies show that people desire the experience to hear the sounds of nature. In open ended as well as quantitative portions of our surveys, we overwhelmingly find, “quiet, peace and solitude,” as well as a need to get away from urbanized environments as one of the most compelling reasons to visit protected areas.

In California’s Muir Woods, we worked with the National Park Service to to deal with issues of visitor generated noise. They really wanted to protect the quiet of the woods, so we worked on developing effective visitor messaging. We placed microphones in the woods and measured the ambient noise levels given the amount of visitor use. We then, posted messages pointing out ways for visitors to reduce noise and then alerted them when they were entering quiet zones. We measured ambient sound levels on days when we had the messages in place and then on days when we did not, based on an experimental design. During our times when the messages were in place, results showed that we were able to reduce ambient noise by three decibels —Although this seems small, it had the effect of a doubling in listening area, in other words what you could hear 100 feet away you could now hear at 140 feet away. The results were something that the National Park Service could really act on, and they created effective, permanent quiet zones. The results of this were recently published in the January issue of the journal Park Science. This shift in behavior is a great example of how principles of LNT can result in the protection of natural sounds, thus protecting wildlife and the visitor experiences parks provide.

SA: With limitless resources, where would your research go?

PN: I believe that we need to push the boundaries of systems thinking and systems modeling. Modeling is so interesting because it brings together people from multiple disciplines and creates linkages among different types of data that show potential unintended consequences of decisions, changes in population growth and provides great context for people to understand how their decisions and actions in one place may have an effect on some place else. These are great issues to think about whether you are in a park of even day-to-day in the grocery store.