The socioecological drivers of tourist decisions and their influence on wildlife tourism sustainability

An ever-increasing number of people use nature for recreation and tourism across all ecoregions. Those activities now threaten the conservation of 5930 species and marine coastal regions are particularly affected (Lusseau & Mancini 2018). We have focussed much of our management efforts on regulating operators and tourism infrastructure, yet very little can be achieved to maintain the sustainability of a destination once many people are attracted to it.

This project will assess how tourists develop their preferences for wildlife tourism destinations and determine how those propagate on social networks. This project will take an ecological approach to understand the social and environmental factors shaping tourist attitudes and preferences. This will be achieved through a combination of social media sampling using approaches we have developed as well as engage in observational and manipulative work to understand how biodiversity couples with tourism attraction (which impacts it).

The project will build on previous work at a local scale (in Scotland - Mancini et al 2018, Pirotta et al. 2015) and global scale (Lusseau & Mancini 2018) offering the unique opportunities to expand existing socioecological agent-based models of wildlife tourism that are directly applied to innovate new governance approaches to wildlife tourism and influences policy.