EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Boat-based tourism and bottlenose dolphins in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand: The role of management in decreasing dolphin-boat interactions

M. Guerra and S.M. Dawson

Tourism Management, 2016, vol. 57, issue C, 3-9

Abstract: Indirect non-lethal effects of wildlife tourism have the potential to compromise the long-term health of animal populations. While appropriate management of impacts is clearly necessary, such management is rarely reported to be effective. Doubtful Sound (New Zealand) has boat-based scenic cruises running year-round. This fjord is also home to an endangered population of bottlenose dolphins, a natural asset for the local tourism industry. A voluntary code of management (COM) was implemented in 2008 to alleviate vessel impacts, establishing guidelines to leave dolphin encounters to chance and restricting vessel traffic in areas of critical habitat. The frequency and duration of interactions decreased substantially since the implementation of the COM. This evidence shows that a science-based voluntary agreement has the potential to mitigate tourism impacts. Nevertheless, due to the small size of the population and its history of low calf survival, a precautionary approach is necessary to further reduce current anthropogenic impacts.

Keywords: Tourism impacts; Bottlenose dolphins; Voluntary compliance; Tourism management; Boat-based tourism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517716300802

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:touman:v:57:y:2016:i:c:p:3-9

DOI: 10.1016/j.tourman.2016.05.010

Access Statistics for this article

Tourism Management is currently edited by Chris Ryan

More articles in Tourism Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:touman:v:57:y:2016:i:c:p:3-9