Assessing Tourism Environment Carrying Capacity Of The Environment Attributes Based On Visitor's Willingness To Pay

Tourism environment carrying capacity(TECC)is one of the most important indictors used in measuring the use limit of the forest park resources.However,the consensus has not been reached with respect to the TECC's content and measure metrics in the academic circles let alone in park management practices.The vast majority of the TECC studies in the past are focused on either social or engineering aspect only,which commonly concentrates on the maximum number of tourists allowed to entry a national forest park during a given period of time.Nevertheless,to some degree,this conventional undertaking much simplifies the underlying TECC concept since the TECC contains much more substances than just one single number of tourists.In this paper,we try to establish a new TECC theoretical framework based on the recreation utility maximization theory,product characteristics theory as well as the environmental attributes.In the process,the experiment choice(CE)and orthogonal design methods are used for questionnaire design following by utilizing the conditional Logit model for parameter estimates.A total of more than 700 park visitors to the Shenyang National Forest park of Liaoning province in China are interviewed for data collection.The survey questionnaire is focused on those tourist sensitive park attributes such as vegetation,coverage,water quality,number of rubbishes along the park trail path,admission fees,and crowding,etc.The results indicate that the sequential order for the tourist's preferences over those recognized environmental attributes are as follows: vegetation coverage,density of visitors,visibility of water,number of rubbish,and admission fees.Of which the threshold for the carrying capacity of vegetation coverage is 78 percent,3 pieces of garbage per 20 meters along the path trail in the park;14 persons per 200 square meters of crowding level,0.85 meters in the lake water visibility,respectively.Based on these research findings,some pertinent policy implications are addressed,accordingly.