Monitoring and management of tourist landing sites in the Maritime Antarctic

• Main Author: Crosbie, Paula Kim
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cambridge 1999
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; South Shetland Islands; Stonehouse; Cuverville; Cuverville Island; Antarc*; Scott Polar Research Institute
• Online Access: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/297935; https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.44989

Tourism is the most recent large-scale human activity in the Antarctic. The 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty requires that all activities in the Antarctic, including tourism, shall "be planned on the basis of information sufficient to allow prior assessments of, and informed judgements about their possible impacts . and . regular and effective monitoring shall take place to allow assessments of the impacts of ongoing activities." As yet there is an acknowledged lack of hard data on the effects of tourism on the Antarctic environment, and no such monitoring programme exists. Because of its scale and environmental context, shipborne tourism is likely to disturb Antarctic ecosystems. 96.5% of all Antarctic tourists are shipborne and over 90% of their visits are to the Maritime Antarctic (Antarctic Peninsula and South Orkney and South Shetland Islands), Antarctica's ecologically richest area. This study is founded on the author's five years of research, both at a field station and as a shipboard expedition leader. The programme formed part of a longer study of polar tourism, Project Antarctic Conservation, directed by Dr Bernard Stonehouse of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. Assessing three phases of shipboard operation - on the ship, in landing craft, and ashore - operations ashore were found to be the most difficult to quantify and likely to show cumulative effects from repeated small perturbations. Thus, landing operations and sites became the main focus of investigation. Three major research objectives were: (1) to examine patterns in landing site use, based on NSF/IAATO data; (2) to assess the industry' s landing site organisation and site selection procedures based on field experience; and (3) to investigate ecological disturbance from tourist visits at a popular landing site: for this Cuverville Island (64°4l'S, 62°38'W) was selected and studied for three consecutive seasons 1992-95. A total of 128 landing sites were identified, clustered into five ...