Browsing by Author "Pettebone, David, author"
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Item Open Access Quantifying and modeling visitor use in Yosemite National Park and Rocky Mountain National Park(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2009) Pettebone, David, author; Newman, Peter, advisorThree manuscripts are presented in this dissertation. The first entitled "Estimating Visitor Use at Attraction Sites and Trailheads Using Automated Visitor Counters in Yosemite National Park" is a methodological paper that examines the use of automated visitor counters, a commonly used device to estimate visitor use in parks and protected areas. This study was conducted in Yosemite National Park in the summer of 2007 and used automated visitor counters to estimate visitor use at several locations in Yosemite Valley. One hundred thirty five hours of direct observations were conducted among six study sites to estimate monitor counting errors. Methods to treat missing monitor data and methods to estimate accurate visitor use counts from automated monitors are discussed. Results show a very strong relationship between observed visitor counts and automated monitor counts (R2 > 0.95) and visitor use estimates are presented for all study sites. This study shows that automated visitor use monitors produce consistent data from which reliable estimates of visitor use can be calculated.