Trampling impacts of recreationists on picnic sites in a Hong Kong country park

The Country Parks programme in Hong Kong has been overwhelmingly successful in generating outdoor recreational demands. Most visitors concentrate in designated barbeque-picnic sites of which many have been badly damaged by intensive recreational use. The conditions in 60 sites in a popular Country Park were evaluated by allocating ordinal ratings to 20 soil-erosion and site-attractiveness indicators. Index sites representing three levels of impacts were studied in detail for specific changes in vegetation and soil that had been induced by trampling. The magnitude of site degradation was indicated by the relative proportions of vegetation, organic litter, and bare ground, covers. The conversion from vegetation to litter was faster than that of litter to bare soil initially, but the converse is true at advanced stages of degradation. Seven out of fourteen site-attractiveness attributes, including accessibility, facility provision, shape, stocking rate and distribution pattern of facilities, on-site naturalness, and scenic diversity, were associated with erosion–in most cases positively. Copyright © 1987 Foundation for Environmental Conservation.