Excerpt from Developing a Natural Resource Inventory and Monitoring Program for Visitor Impacts on Recreation Sites: A Procedural Manual National parks were perhaps an inevitable consequence of population growth and associated resource development, and the pressures of this growth present parks with their greatest challenge today. The National Park Service (nps) has recognized the need for effective visitor management and resource protec tion programs to balance visitation with its associated resource impacts. The recurring question, are we loving our parks to death? Increasingly challenges managers to develop and implement management policies, strategies, and actions that permit the recreational use of parks without compromising their ecological and aesthetic integrity. Furthermore, managers are frequently forced to engage in this balancing act under the close scrutiny of the public, competing interest groups, and the courts. As with other prominent and critical resource issues, managers can no longer afford a wait-and-see attitude or rely on subjective impressions of deterioration in resource conditions. Managers require scientifically valid research and monitoring data. Such data should describe the nature and severity of resource impacts and the relationships of controlling visitor use and biophysical factors. Research has revealed that these relationships are complex and not always intuitively obvious. A reliable information base is therefore essential to managers seeking to develop and implement effective visitor and resource management programs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.