Indigenous peoples and rainforest tourism: canopy walkways as tourist attractions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Globally, over 20 canopy walkways have been built in tropical and temperate rainforest. Most of these rainforest canopy walkways are built in protected areas or on private rainforest reserves. Tropical rainforest canopy walkways are found in Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah; Brunei (Ulu Temburong); Indonesia (Mt Halimun, Java); Ghana (Kakum); Brazil; Costa Rica; Colombia (Amacayacu); Peru (Rio Sucusari, Amazon); Guyana (Iwokrama); Samoa (Falealupo); and at five sites in Australia (Daintree, Mamu, O’Reilly’s and Mt Tamborine in Queensland, and Dorrigo in New South Wales). The O’Reilly’s Tree Top Walk in Southeast Queensland, opened in 1987, was the first canopy walkway built in Australia and the world, comprising nine wooden suspension bridges and two lookouts in a strangler fig tree (Mylne, 2009; Schwarzer, 2010). Rainforest canopy walkways have been constructed in Peru, Nigeria, Madagascar, Brazil, Ghana and Guyana by the Greenheart Conservation Company, a Canadian firm that builds walkways, platforms and zip lines to help protect and conserve threatened forests through nature tourism (van Daalen, 2005). Other rainforest canopy walkways are planned for national parks in Rwanda and Uganda (Seibel, 2010). Temperate rainforest canopy walkways are also found in Vancouver, Canada, and in southeast Australia (Tahune Airwalk, Otway Fly and Illawarra Fly Treetop Walk) (Mylne, 2009). In the USA, a canopy walkway was constructed at Myakka River, Florida, through subtropical oak/palm hammocks (Benshoff, 2002; Lowman, 2004; Lowman et al., 2006; Lowman, 2009a; Tree Foundation, 2010). These canopy walkways are mainly built as suspended wooden bridges on cableways strung between large trees, with viewing platforms built around trees, and canopy towers (Barker and Sutton, 1997; Lowman, 2004; Schwarzer, 2010). More recent and larger free-standing metal canopy walkways in forests have elevated metal grid pathways and towers, with cantilever platforms jutting out. The walkways are ‘mediated attractions’ (Weaver, 2008) that provide access to the rainforest canopy for both researchers and tourists (GCP, 2010; Rahman, 2002; Inoue et al., 1995; van Daalen, 2005; Lowman et al., 2006; Lowman, 2009b). Limited research has addressed management issues in making the forest canopy accessible to visitors through elevated viewing structures or aerial walkways (Frost, 1999, Evans, 2000; Frost, 2001; Lowman, 2004, 2009a; Seibel, 2010). This includes the lack of metrics to measure the success or benefits of walkways (Lowman, 2009a), and the impact of metal structures on the ‘naturalness’ of the forest experience (Evans, 2000; Seibel, 2010).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".