As demand for outdoor recreation in protected areas (PAs) continues to intensify worldwide, its impact on wildlife remains poorly understood, potentially hindering conservation effectiveness. To address this gap, I used camera traps in three BC Parks to investigate how recreation affects wildlife behaviour and diversity, leveraging trail closures as quasi-experimental controls. First, I examined recreation effects on the mammal community in two adjacent PAs (Joffre Lakes and Garibaldi Parks), which were closed for different durations during the COVID-19 pandemic. I found weak evidence that, when recreation was higher, detections declined for black bear, mule deer, and marten, while detections of bobcat and hoary marmot shifted closer to trails. Across years, species richness and diversity were higher in the closed vs. open PA in 2020 but did not decline consistently over time despite increases in recreation in 2021 and 2022. Notably, several rare species were only detected in the lower-recreation PA, suggesting they may be filtered out of the higher-recreation PA. This emphasizes the need for long-term monitoring to detect delayed and cumulative effects of recreation on mammal communities. Next, I focused on a particularly disturbance-sensitive taxon, bears, leveraging the partial closure of the Berg Lake Trail in Mount Robson Park to investigate whether black and grizzly bears showed fear, attraction or neutral behavioural responses to varying recreation levels. I compared weekly habitat use, daily activity patterns and direct responses to hikers (i.e., Avoidance-Attraction Ratios; AARs) between open and closed sections of the trail. Both bear species showed patterns consistent with fear responses, with some black bear behaviours also suggesting attraction (i.e., higher detections during site-weeks with greater recreation). Rather than avoiding hikers at the weekly scale or directly, both bears used daily temporal partitioning to minimize encounters with hikers. These findings demonstrate scope for human-bear coexistence through co-adaptation, whereby recreation is managed to be moderate and predictable, and bears have access to spatial refuge during peak times. This study emphasizes that understanding how recreation affects wildlife behaviour, and the spatiotemporal scale at which this occurs, is critical for guiding adaptive management to balance outdoor recreation with conservation goals.
Alexandra Dimitriou (Thu,) studied this question.