Overview
- In the third episode of Closer to Nature, Parks Victoria's new podcast, we speak to Dr Kelly de Bie, Manager of Evaluation Information and Social Sciences, about what the data tells us about how people use our parks – the good and the bad.
- We also get out in the field to speak to some inspiring volunteers from the Friends of Canadian Corridor, a group dedicated to improving and protecting Woowookarung Regional Park, near the city of Ballarat in the central highlands of Victoria.
- Closer to Nature is a new podcast by Parks Victoria, about how the climate crisis is unfolding across Victoria.
Subscribe to Closer to Nature wherever you get your podcasts.
Analysing visitor behaviour in parks
Dr Kelly de Bie is Parks Victoria's Manager of Evaluation Information and Social Sciences. Her team pours over detailed data sets on the daily, looking at ways to improve the management of the many parks and reserves across our state.
Photo: Dr Kelly de Bie, Manager of Evaluation Information and Social Sciences at Parks Victoria, analyses datasets to help inform how park management can be improved.
"We know from our data that about 95 percent of Victorians support active conservation in our parks, so that's a really encouraging statistic, and that has been consistent over the last five years so that we feel like that's a fairly solid trend."
"We have a team that focuses on social science, a team that focuses on geospatial science, which is our spatial and mapping data, and then a team that focuses on park evaluation, so really (it's about) understanding how our management is influencing conditions of the values that we care about on the ground."
However, despite the good intentions of the overwhelming majority of Victoria's, there are still risky behaviours that some visitors often undertake without realising the consequences that can seriously hamper conservation efforts.
"In a well-managed park system you can try your best to minimise visitation impacts. However, it also relies on positive visitor behaviours, which is something that you need to foster within a community."
The question of how people should appropriately visit parks without damaging them is one of the many issues Kelly and her team look into.
