Sensitivity of wildlife to spatial patterns of recreationist behavior: A critical assessment of minimum approaching distances and buffer areas for grassland birds

By E. Fernández‐Juricic, M. Venier, D. Renison, Daniel T. Blumstein. 2005

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A major goal of protected area management is to promote coexistence between wildlife and people and managers may restrict human activity by creating buffer zones. There are a number of assumptions implicit in establishing buffer zones that are typically based on how animals respond to approaching humans. Conventional wisdom suggests that animals will be more sensitive to directly approaching humans than humans approaching tangentially. Visibility and detectability are important factors influencing a species response to an approaching threat. Grasslands are an ideal system to study the different approach types because visibility is similar in all directions. We focused on five species of birds, four of them endemic, in the high Pampa de Achala mountain grassland of Argentina to study the effects of direct and tangential approaches on disturbance, and to evaluate five methods typically used to estimate buffer areas considering their sensitivity to the type of approach and their ability to estimate areas large enough to ensure the protection of the target species. We found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, four out of the five species showed greater flight initiation distance response to tangential rather than direct approaches, and that the minimum approach distance and buffer area estimates for these species varied significantly (in some cases an order of magnitude) between methods. Variability in the estimates between methods could be related to their different assumptions, which are not typically evaluated. More generally, we should be cautious when asserting that a buffer area calculated from direct approaches necessarily eliminates human disturbance. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f1d9227834773b8f7bce5de91fb0939909abe34

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Citations in the corpus

Effects of predator behavior and proximity on risk assessment by Columbian black-tailed deer (2006, methodology): “…its use as a tool for wildlife managers in developing buffer and setback distances between animal nesting/feeding areas and human visitors (Ferna´ndez-Juricic et al., 2001, 2002, 2005; Rodgers and Smith, 1995, 1997), and their use in the assessment of animal welfare states as an indicator…”
Evaluating methods to quantify anthropogenic stressors on wild animals (2007, background): “, 1993; Rodgers and Smith, 1995; Giese, 1998) or ‘buffer zones’, areas beyond which people can be said to minimally disturb or impact wildlife (e.g., Holmes et al., 1993; Rodgers and Smith, 1997; Carney and Sydeman, 1999; Rodgers and Schwikert, 2002; Fernández-Juricic et al., 2005).”
Effect of human activities on the behaviour of breeding Spanish imperial eagles (Aquila adalberti): management implications for the conservation of a threatened species (2006, methodology): “Buffer zones may be estimated through different methods (see the review in Fernández-Juricic et al., 2005).”
A review of flight-initiation distances and their application to managing disturbance to Australian birds (2012, unknown): “…by direct approaches (e.g. Heil et al. 2007; but see Burger et al. 2010) suggesting that such effects should be investigated before designating buffers, leading some authors to propose various inflation factors to FIDs (Fernández-Juricic et al. 2005; Blumstein and Fernández-352 Juricic 2010).”
Recreation and large mammal activity in an urban nature reserve (2006, unknown): “…ID 83540, USA. rodents (Mainini et al., 1993; Magle et al., 2005), birds (Yalden and Yalden, 1990; Miller et al., 1998; Stalmaster and Kaiser, 1998; Fernández-Juricic et al., 2005), herpetiles (Hecnar and M’Closkey, 1998; Lacy and Martins, 2003; Rodrı́quez-Prieto and Fernández-Juricic, 2005),…”
Testing the minimum approach distance guidelines for incubating Royal penguins Eudyptes schlegeli (2005, background): “Several previous studies have demonstrated how visitor behaviour (e.g. approach type, walking speed, angle of approach) can influence seabird responses (Burger and Gochfield, 1981; Wilson et al., 1991; Giese, 1998; Martin et al., 2004; Fernández-Juricic et al., 2005).”