Experimental long-term evaluation of a campaign to reduce freeriding-wildlife conflicts of snow sports
Marcel Hunziker, WSL - Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf (CH)
The appearance of outdoor recreation activities has increased significantly all over the world as well as in Switzerland. This development can lead to conflicts, in particular between snow-sports participants and native wildlife populations in subalpine areas. The Swiss and Austrian campaign "Respektiere deine Grenzen” so far successfully reduced such conflicts by positively influencing the respective behaviour of people who engage in ski-touring and snow-shoeing by means of information and sensitization. However, it has been known that one group of snow-sports participants can hardly be influenced by such information campaigns, the so-called freeriders: skiers and snowboarders who use the transport facilities of ski resorts but ride down off the ski-runs. Thus, a specific freerider campaign, called "respect wildlife", was launched in Switzerland, focussing on this group using its media and language. Our study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of this campaign. Furthermore, it aimed at comparing and understanding the influence of different elements of the campaign in order to enable future improvements of visitor-management measures focussing on targets groups not accessible by traditional information campaigns. To reach these aims the following research questions were to be answered: (1) How effective is freerider-specific campaign "respect wildlife” regarding the desired wildlife-responsible behaviour of people who engage in freeriding in ski resorts?, (2) What are the significant influencing factors on the desired wildlife-responsible behaviour of the freriders? What role do thereby play the different elements of the "respect-wildlife” campaign? What other factors, beyond the campaign, are also important? To answer the research questions, surveys in ski resorts (i.e. handing out questionnaires that were returned by post) were conducted that only included freeriders (selected due to their visible behaviour, equipment and/or by an oral filter question). Thereby, an experimental design was applied, i.e., surveys were conducted in a treatment area where the campaign was active on site as well as in a control area where no on-site measures were taken. In addition, the surveys were conducted in four waves (with increasing treatment intensity in the treatment area) during the skiing seasons 2013/14 and 2015/16.