Sustainable management of an alpine national park: handling the two-edged effect of tourism

Attracting visitors to an alpine national park can open up additional sources of funding for species conservation. However, tourism also brings ecologically negative impacts to the park and, in particular, to endangered species. In this paper, we discuss the handling of this two-edged effect of nature-based tourism within the context of a national park’s management decision. We develop a stylized model which frames the interaction of a representative largely unknown species, its habitat, and park visitors in an alpine ecosystem. In applying this to the protection of a rock partridge population in the Hohe Tauern National Park (Austria), we illustrate that a combined visitor and species protection policy can maximize steady state net benefits from tourism and conservation, while ensuring that the endangered species reaches its conservation target in the long run. Thus, even for a small, largely unknown species such as the rock partridge, and not only for popular species like the golden eagle, it is possible to endogenously generate a conservation budget by attracting visitors.