Monitoring Visitation Impacts in the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park

Abstract

The Lençóis Maranhenses National Park (LMNP), a brazilian federal protected area managed by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), is among the main tourist destinations in the country. In 2021 there were more than 280 thousand visits, the sixth most visited national park in Brazil. Such an intense visitation generates both social impacts such as income generation for the region, as well as biophysical impacts such as greater presence of solid waste. It is the role of the Management of protected areas to carry out management actions to reduce negative impacts and maximize positive impacts, for which it is essential to identify the impacts and where they occur. With the aim of assessing the current condition of visitation impacts indicators and using the methodology proposed in the Protocol for Monitoring Visitation Impacts in the LMNP, the first monitoring cycle was carried out in September 2022. The article presents the results of 4 social indicators (Quality of services, Quality of infrastructure, Intensity of Use and Percentage of complaints) and 4 biophysical ones (Presence of garbage, Width of the Trail, Number of alternative trails and Number of deviations per trail’s km). It was found that only 25% of the indicators met the established standards, while the social indicators showed better results than the biophysical ones.