Marine wildlife tourism can provide a range of education and conservation benefits for visitors. These benefits derive from close personal encounters with marine wildlife and visitor learning about marine species and ocean environments. There has been limited assessment of marine wildlife
tourism experiences and educational programs to identify whether these increase tourists' knowledge, promoting attitudinal shifts and also lifestyle changes that aid marine conservation and help to conserve marine wildlife. Similarly, there has been little evaluation of on-site and longer
term conservation intentions, or behaviors, of visitors that benefit marine wildlife and environments. This article reviews the education and conservation benefits of marine wildlife experiences in Australia using Orams' framework of indicators to manage marine tourism. The key indicator for
tourists assessed in this article is behavior/lifestyle change that benefits marine species, along with three indicators of conservation outcomes for marine environments. Information is drawn from selected case studies of research on guided tourist encounters with whales, dolphins, and marine
turtles from 1996 to 2007, mainly in Australia. This analysis found tourist learning during mediated encounters with marine wildlife contributes to proenvironmental attitudes and improved on-site behavior changes, with some longer term intentions to engage in conservation actions that benefit
marine species.
This chapter introduces marine wildlife tours and visitor benefits from marine wildlife encounters, then critically reviews the psychological, educational and conservation benefits of tourist participation in a range of marine wildlife experiences.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.