Visitor counting with accoustic slab sensors in the Swiss national park
Reto Rupf, Michael Wernli, Flurin Filli · Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften digital collection (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) · 2006
Monitoring of visitor flow in recreational parks is important to various tasks of management, e.g. to assess the impact of visitors to the nature, to get information about the signification to the regional market or to estimate the demand trends for the future (Cessford & Muhar 2003). However, data acquisition is a very time-consuming and money-intensive assignment. There are three main categories of data collection methods: self-counting, directcounting and indirect counting (Hollenhorst et al. 1992). Depending on the goal of visitor monitoring, different data collection types are used. Self-counting methods are quite uncertain because their backflow is low. With direct-counting methods a lot of information, such as visitor characteristics, visitor behaviour and visitor numbers can be collected. The disadvantage of these methods is their big costs. A lot of human resources are needed to collect data. Indirect-counting systems generate simple estimations of recreational use, which are quite accurate after calibration (Hollenhorst et al. 1992).