The Impact of Concessioners on Sustainability in and around U.S. National Parks: A Case Study of Grand Teton National Park Concessioners

Concessioners play an important role in park and protected area management by providing visitor services. Historically, concessioners were criticized for their negative impacts on environmental sustainability. However, due to policy changes, technological advances, and shifting market demands, there is a need to reevaluate the role of concessioners in sustainable destination management in and around parks and protected areas. The purpose of this qualitative case study situated in Grand Teton National Park (GTNP), which was guided by social exchange theory, was to explore U.S. national park concessioners’ influence on sustainable development at the destination level from the perspective of National Park Service (NPS) staff, concessioners, and local community members. Sustainability was examined holistically as a multifaceted construct with integrated socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental dimensions. Twenty-three participants completed semistructured interviews. Researchers identified four thematic categories describing concessioners’ influence on sustainability; motivations and barriers to pursuing sustainability initiatives; and situational factors that facilitated concessioners’ sustainability actions. While participants commented on the negative environmental impacts of concessioners and their operations, these data suggest that concessioners were working individually and collaboratively to promote environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural sustainability in and around GTNP. Some concessioners were even described as leaders, testing and driving the development of innovative sustainability policies and practices. These actions were motivated, in part, by contractual obligations and profit generation. However, concessioners also had strong intangible motivators, such as intrinsic values and a strong sense of community, that drove their positive contributions to sustainability. Based on these data, we recommend that those involved in future theoretical and practical work with concessioners acknowledge the importance of both tangible and intangible motivators when attempting to promote higher levels of sustainability achievement and collaboration. This will become increasingly important as land management agencies continue to embrace strategies beyond the traditional “parks as islands” approach to management. Additionally, future work should explore more specifically the role of policy, conceptualizations of sustainability, and private industry sponsorship in promoting concessioners’ contributions to sustainability, especially in collaborative settings. This work is needed to understand if and how these observations generalize to other contexts.

Integrating Aspatial and Spatial Data to Improve Visitor Management: Pairing Visitor Questionnaires with Multiple Spatial Methodologies in Grand Teton National Park, WY, USA

Recent advances in geospatial technology resulted in GPS and GIS-based approaches becoming more common in visitor use management studies. Many of these studies focus on describing the spatial and temporal patterns and trends of use. While these descriptive data are useful, recent reviews of the recreation literature using GPS and GIS techniques suggest that spatial technologies should be linked to aspatial approaches – such as visitor surveys – to better understand the experiences and behaviors of visitors. However, these calls in the literature have not provided directions for how such an integration could be achieved in a way that is useful to both scientists and managers. This paper presents a multi-faceted methodological approach employed in a study of visitor use and experience at String and Leigh Lakes in Grand Teton National Park, WY. We used an intentional, integrated approach, where aspatial data was linked to three different types of spatial data to better understand the social and ecological environments of SLL and their influence on visitor experiences. Visitors completed questionnaires before and after their experience at SLL that were combined with GPS-based tracking data. We related both the survey results and GPS tracking data to a GIS analysis of mapped, biophysical user-created resource impacts. We also paired spatial-aspatial data in an experimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of visitor messaging. The deliberate combination of aspatial and spatial data allowed us to investigate site-specific management concerns and theory-based questions. We found that paired spatial-aspatial data provided a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between the social, experiential, and biophysical factors measured in our study. Overall, this paper provides a method for thoughtfully integrating GPS and GIS-based techniques with questionnaires in a way that contributes to both the science and management of visitor use in parks and protected areas.

Lights, bats, and buildings: investigating the factors influencing roosting sites and habitat use by bats in Grand Teton National Park

Free-flying bats are highly affected by artificial night lighting, causing individuals to either 1) gather in unnaturally high densities around the light sources to exploit insects, or 2) travel increased distances to avoid light exposure. Similarly, nocturnal insects are disproportionately attracted to night lighting, trapping them until they die of exhaustion. The advent of new lighting technology which may decrease the impacts of night lighting on bats and insects by primarily producing light at wavelengths these animals are not sensitive to (i.e. in the red portion of the spectrum) is promising, however no studies have shown this at a large scale, and not in North America. Similarly, many studies on the effects of lights on bats, in general, have been on European species, and thus our overall understanding of how North American species are affected is low. Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, provides an excellent natural system to study the effects of lights on bat behavior, as well as to test possible mitigation methods, as the park supports a large community of over a dozen species, as well as sizeable human infrastructure that generates night light. From June through September, 2019, we undertook a large-scale, blocked experiment examining bat activity and space use in Colter Bay Village under both traditional street-lighting, as well as new “bat friendly” street lighting. Using both passive echolocation records and radiotelemetry, we collected data that will allow us to examine the ability of red LED streetlights to mitigate artificial light’s negative impacts on bats and insects. Featured photo from figure 2 in report.