American and Canadian National Park Agency Responses to Declining Visitation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AbstractRecent research has suggested a decline in visits to national parks in both the United States and Canada. We analyzed contemporary (2000 to 2009) national policy documents (e.g., annual reports, strategic plans, commission findings) in both countries to assess national park agency reactions to recent changes in visitation patterns. Neither the Parks Canada Agency nor the National Park Service directly mentioned declines in visitation in these high level documents, focusing instead on identifying major external "challenges" related to building visitation. In response to these challenges, both agencies moved to bolster and redefine their educational efforts to reach new audiences, particularly youth and minority/immigrant groups in urban areas. Both agencies also shared four key assumptions, most significantly the belief that decreased visitation will lead to decreased public and political support for parks. They also ignored potential benefits of decreasing use, such as decreased environmental or social impacts. We suggest that the growing focus on increasing use, in tandem with the contemporary neoliberal political environment, leads these national park agencies to systematically emphasize use values while de-emphasizing preservation values. The park agencies are becoming increasingly focused on "re-engaging" with the public to increase political support for the bureaucracies.KEYWORDS: Declining visitationneoliberalismnational parkspreservation versus use
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".