Increased visitation to protected areas could have adverse impacts on the conservation values in the protected areas, and therefore effective visitor monitoring methods are needed to meet the complex management challenges that arise. Collecting data on human impacts is highly time consuming, thus requiring more effective tools that allow for high‐quality and long‐term measurements. In this study, we show how unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e. UAV or drones) could be used to monitor tourism impacts in protected areas. Tourism has boomed in national parks in Norway in recent years, such as in Jotunheimen National Park for which this study applies. We test the use of drones on a site where new tourist facilities will be established to set a baseline to identify future changes. We demonstrate how drones could help protected area management by monitoring visitor use patterns and commonly associated impacts such as trail condition (width and depth), vegetation structure and disturbances, informal trail proliferation, trampling, and trash and other impacts along the trails. We assessed accuracy and reliability compared with intensive field measurements of impacts and found low‐cost drones to be effective in mapping the study area with a resolution of 0.5 cm/pixel: drone derived trail measurements were comparable to traditional measurements with a negligible divergence on trail width measurements and a consistent 1.05 cm divergence on trail depth measurements that can be corrected with a few validation points. In addition, we created a high‐resolution vegetation classification map that could be used as a baseline for monitoring impacts. We conclude that drones can effectively contribute to visitor monitoring by reducing time spent in the field and by providing high‐resolution time series that could be used as baseline to measure tourism impacts on conservation values in protected areas.

中文翻译：

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无人机作为监测公园和保护区中人类影响和植被变化的工具

对保护区的访问增加可能会对保护区的保护价值产生不利影响，因此需要有效的访问者监视方法来应对出现的复杂管理挑战。收集有关人类影响的数据非常耗时，因此需要更有效的工具来进行高质量和长期的测量。在这项研究中，我们展示了无人驾驶飞机（例如，无人机或无人驾驶飞机）如何用于监测保护区对旅游业的影响。近年来，挪威的国家公园旅游业蓬勃发展，例如本研究适用的佐敦海门国家公园。我们将在将要建立新的旅游设施的站点上测试无人机的使用，以设置基准以识别未来的变化。我们演示了无人驾驶飞机如何通过监视游客的使用模式以及通常与之相关的影响（例如步道状况（宽度和深度），植被结构和干扰，非正式步道扩散，践踏和垃圾以及沿步道的其他影响）来帮助保护区管理。与密集的实地测量结果相比，我们评估了准确性和可靠性，发现低成本无人机可以有效地绘制研究区域的地图，分辨率为0.5厘米/像素：无人机得出的航迹测量结果与传统测量结果相当，航迹差异很小宽度测量值和在尾迹深度测量值上始终一致的1.05厘米发散度，可以通过一些验证点进行校正。此外，我们创建了高分辨率的植被分类图，可以用作监测影响的基准。我们得出结论，无人驾驶飞机可以通过减少在野外的时间并提供高分辨率的时间序列（可以用作衡量旅游业对保护区保护价值的影响的基线）来有效地促进游客的监控。