Recreational use of forests and disturbance of wildlife
Norman Dandy
Lead Author: Mariella Marzano
We use some essential cookies to make this website work.
We’d like to set additional cookies to understand how you use forestresearch.gov.uk, remember your settings and improve our services.
We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services.
Preparing to search
Norman Dandy
Lead Author: Mariella Marzano
Forests are popular places for recreation, but some activities can have negative impacts on wildlife. Land managers have to balance delivery of the social and economic benefits derived from outdoor recreation with nature conservation objectives. This literature review provides an overview of potential disturbance issues and a guide to the evidence on impacts from walking, cycling, horse riding, off-road vehicle use, camping, and other recreational activities that take place in forests. Greatest attention has been directed towards walking, and impacts on soils, vegetation and birdlife. Much of the literature focuses on the physical characteristics of disturbance but there is little social scientific analysis of recreational users, for example on how their values and awareness relate to disturbance, or wider social factors that influence where, when and whether impacts occur. An holistic approach to understanding and managing the interaction of recreation and forest wildlife is needed, which links ecological studies with social data.
Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer when you visit a website.
We use cookies to store information about how you use the dwi.gov.uk website, such as the pages you visit.
Find out more about cookies on forestresearch.gov.uk
We use 3 types of cookie. You can choose which cookies you're happy for us to use.
These essential cookies do things like remember your progress through a form. They always need to be on.
We use Google Analytics to measure how you use the website so we can improve it based on user needs. Google Analytics sets cookies that store anonymised information about: how you got to the site the pages you visit on forestresearch.gov.uk and how long you spend on each page what you click on while you're visiting the site
Some forestresearch.gov.uk pages may contain content from other sites, like YouTube or Flickr, which may set their own cookies. These sites are sometimes called ‘third party’ services. This tells us how many people are seeing the content and whether it’s useful.