Page 10 - Professorial Lecture - Professor Mapaure

4. IMPORTANT ECOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

4.1 Roads, vehicle volumes and human densities

Careful placement and management of the road infrastructure in tourist
destinations is very important, particularly in protected areas. Considerations must
be given to potential ecologically-sensitive areas, particularly the maximum length
of the road network itself, and its placement thereof. It is inevitable that whenever
a road is opened up, there will be habitat loss and habitat fragmentation. Thus,
avoidance of too much fragmentation and too much destruction of habitat is very
important. The question is how much is ‘too much’? This requires ecological
determination of edge effects and effective conserved areas relative to the original
extent of habitat. Roads can lead to loss or decline of biological diversity through
habitat fragmentation, edge effects and soil erosion. In the illustration given below
(Figure 4), too many roads create significant edge effects and a reduction in original
habitat suitable for faunal species.

Figure 4: Simplistic illustration of the edge effect created by road network (A) which
reduces the effective conserved area (B) (dark areas in B are the effectively-
conserved areas (which are much less than the original area))

If vehicle volumes are not monitored and/or controlled, there can be several
problems associated with them. Most tourist destinations in southern Africa base
their numbers on the carrying capacity of the accommodation facilities rather than
on that of the natural environment. This is problematic because accommodation
facilities are not in any way linked to the ecological carrying capacity of the habitat.
Problems may range from animals being bumped as a result of too many vehicles
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