Scientific developments of the Kronotsky Reserve employee will ensure the implementation of the new law on tourism in protected areas

Experts have long urged for creation of a federal law on ecological tourism in specially protected natural areas of Russia. There has been a weird paradox in the country: there is tourism, but there is no legislative regulation to it. Hence, there have been numerous gaps in norms and standards which lead to harm to fragile protected nature. At the same time, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources of Russia, the attendance of protected areas of federal significance this year will exceed 12 million people. The growth of the tourist flow in the protected areas in recent years has been 20-30% per year.

One of the new law goals is to bring the organization of ecological tourism in protected areas to a single standard in order to minimize harm to nature through calculation and compliance with the maximum permissible recreational capacity of protected areas.

"For the first time, the concept of the maximum permissible recreational capacity of the territory has been fixed in the legislation. Now I hope that in the near future, unified methodological recommendations for the calculation of recreational capacity will be finalized and come into force for federal protected areas, without which the implementation of this legislation will be difficult. We are proud that it was our employee Anna Zavadskaya who co-authored a fundamental scientific publication on this topic. There are five or six different approaches in the world to determining the human influence on the natural territory, and in our country there has not yet been an agreed opinion on which approach is considered optimal. However, soon we will start using the one that was born in our reserve!"– said Daria Panicheva, head of the Scientific department of the Kronotsky State Reserve.

Daria Panicheva and Senior researcher Anna Zavadskaya have been studying anthropogenic influence (human influence) and specifically recreational loads on nature for a long time. 

Within the framework of the new approach, Anna Zavadskaya and her co-authors find ways to move away from the fight against the already adverse (most often irreversible) consequences of tourism that appear when only the physical capacity of the infrastructure is considered, and move on to harm prevention. The modern approach to recreational capacity operates with such concepts as "maximizing the spectrum of recreational opportunities" and "evaluating the experience of visitors" ("how to distribute and what to occupy 500 tourists so that they do not trample on one section of the trail, but do not disperse anywhere?") or "active management of the state of natural resources" ("how many people and how can they look at animals so that they continue to feel comfortable?") Complex models and a flexible monitoring system allow not only to calculate such norms, but also to maintain their relevance.