We have developed a system that streams and archives live sound from remote areas across Japan via an unmanned automatic camera. The system was used to carry out pilot bird censuses in woodland; this allowed us to examine the use of live sound transmission and the role of social media as a mediator in remote scientific monitoring. The system has been streaming sounds 8 h per day for more than five years. We demonstrated that: (1) the transmission of live sound from a remote woodland could be used effectively to monitor birds in a remote location; (2) the simultaneous involvement of several participants via Internet Relay Chat to listen to live sound transmissions could enhance the accuracy of census data collection; and (3) interactions through Twitter allowed members of the public to engage or help with the remote monitoring of birds and experience inaccessible nature through the use of novel technologies.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0708-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Sustainable practices are particularly important in the tourism industry, and a substantial number of studies have shown that different environmentally sustainable practices (hereinafter written as ESP) are used by hoteliers who want to be responsible in the industry. On the other hand, hotel practices have been changing according to the guests' expectations to attract more guests; thus, filling the gap between guests' expectations and satisfaction of ESP is important. Based on that, this study undertook quantitative research with aiming to identify the gap between guests' expectations and satisfaction of ESP in Sri Lankan hotels. The study adopted five dimensions related to ESP which were identified through a preliminary study of previous literature. An empirical survey was conducted online with a structured questionnaire to identify the guests' expectations. Results of factor analysis revealed that environmentally-friendly production, waste management, food and beverage production, and environmentally-friendly hotel construction are the priorities of guests' expectations. Moreover, waste management, biodiversity conservation and food and beverage production represent a significant gap between the guests' expectations and satisfaction of ESP. Finally, this study found that guests' expectations mainly rely on the superficial natural atmosphere; therefore, more appropriate information and interpretation of sustainability would be needed for guests to optimize the usage of natural resources. Moreover, the study recommends that determining the reasons for making guests unsatisfied and find the solutions to minimize the dissatisfaction are important since currently available ESP have not met the satisfaction level of the guests.
Tourism sites under increasing pressures is expected to apply the concept of "Tourism Carrying Capacity (TCC)" for planning and management. In the context of natural protected areas, it is said that considering various managerial dimensions and tourists' experiential dimensions with resource dimensions to determine the extent of changes that are acceptable is more realistic, as ecosystem changes are dynamic and cannot be easily identified over short periods. This approach is known as the "Limits of Acceptable Change" (LAC)", but the LAC approach and its methodologies are still evolving. This study therefore aimed to develop a framework for measuring the experiential dimension of the LAC approach, focusing on the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon (RISL) in Palau. We used six indicators defined through the preliminary research, and did experimental surveys with the structured questionnaire, the line census and the noise investigation for collecting both subjective and objective data. Results indicated that tourists' experiential satisfaction was remarkably high which could outweigh concerns about congestion. On the other hand, the analysis of the relation among indicators illustrated a candidate threshold of the number of visitors at a time, although we cannot be decisive with only one-time research. From the perspective of the evaluation of the methods, we found that subjective data was not effective in some cases as they could be too affected by personal background to reproduce an actual condition at the site. Further research including surveys on the resource dimension are needed for obtaining more reliable results for developing the LAC approach.
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