Ecotourism’s Hidden Footprint: New Analysis Reveals Growing Threat to Protected Areas

Ecotourism has long been celebrated as a win-win for conservation and local economies, but a sweeping new analysis suggests the industry’s green credentials may be masking a darker reality. A bibliometric study published in Nature Conservation examined nearly 700 scientific documents published between 2016 and 2025, revealing that even the most well-intentioned nature-based tourism can leave lasting scars on the very ecosystems it claims to protect.

The research, conducted from a recreation ecology perspective, analyzed 684 documents retrieved from the Scopus database using carefully constructed search equations. The findings paint a picture of a rapidly maturing scientific field—one that has grown at an annual rate of 15.25% since 2019—as researchers worldwide grapple with the paradox of tourism that damages the natural areas it depends upon.

Recreation ecology, the scientific discipline underpinning the analysis, focuses on understanding how recreational activities affect ecosystem structure and function. The reviewed literature consistently documents a range of environmental impacts associated with ecotourism, including wildlife disturbance, soil degradation and erosion, carbon dioxide emissions, waste generation, and mounting pressure on natural resources. These effects are particularly pronounced along trails, campsites, picnic areas, and wildlife observation sites where visitor concentrations are highest.

The geographic distribution of research output reveals a striking imbalance. The United States leads with 119 publications, followed by Australia with 78, China with 78, the United Kingdom with 62, and Canada with 50. This concentration in developed Anglophone nations raises concerns about what researchers call epistemic asymmetry—where developing economies are relegated to the role of subjects rather than generators of knowledge. The authors warn that management models designed for temperate zones of the Global North may be poorly suited to the socioeconomic vulnerabilities and megadiverse ecosystems of the Global South.

Institutional leadership mirrors this geographic pattern. Griffith University in Australia tops the list with 16 publications, followed by Murdoch University with 14, the Chinese Academy of Sciences with 13, the University of Johannesburg with 12, and Universidade do Algarve with 12. The co-authorship network centers on researchers including Newsome D., Dearden P., and Cong R., suggesting that a relatively small group of influential scientists shapes the direction of the global research agenda.

The thematic structure of the field reveals an interdisciplinary evolution. Environmental Science accounts for 26.3% of publications, Social Sciences for 19.7%, and Agricultural and Biological Sciences for 15.7%. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identified 263 terms organized into six thematic clusters, with ecotourism serving as the central node linked through 1,099 structural connections. The dominance of biodiversity, sustainability, recreation, and environmental conservation as research themes underscores the field’s shift from purely biophysical diagnosis toward integrated socio-environmental frameworks.

Despite this growing sophistication, the analysis identifies a critical methodological gap. The relationship between social and ecological dimensions has traditionally been neglected in recreation ecology, with few interdisciplinary studies effectively connecting both aspects. The authors argue that when ecotourism planning lacks interdisciplinary preventive design, ecological problems—such as water pollution or inadequate waste management—can cascade into social crises, governance tensions, and public health issues for local communities.

The reviewed literature also highlights tensions between visitor experience and climate sustainability. Research on tourist itinerary design demonstrates that efforts to maximize economic benefit frequently conflict with the goal of minimizing carbon dioxide emissions from transportation. While optimization models and fuzzy logic approaches have been developed to mitigate the transportation footprint, these tools reduce but do not eliminate the underlying ecological pressures associated with visitor mobility.

Acoustic and landscape disturbances represent another underappreciated dimension of ecotourism’s impact. Studies in highly sensitive national parks, including those in Alaska and Hawaii, reveal that tourist transportation patterns—both ground routes and low-altitude overflights—drastically alter natural soundscapes. These acoustic intrusions disrupt ecological integrity and destabilize wildlife behavior patterns, effects that persist long after visitors depart.

The study concludes that ecotourism, when it exceeds the actual ecological limits of protected sites, intensifies adverse impacts across physical, biological, and environmental dimensions. The authors call for integrating rigorous economic valuation tools and carrying capacity indicators into decision-making, while urging future research to develop predictive simulation models that effectively connect numerical indicators of recreation ecology with social well-being and participatory governance of local and Indigenous communities. As nature-based tourism continues its global expansion, the findings serve as a timely reminder that sustainability claims must be backed by science, not just marketing.

Beyond the headline findings, the methodological choices of the study itself offer useful context for interpreting its conclusions. By relying exclusively on Scopus and restricting the corpus to English-language publications, the analysis captures a substantial share of the indexed literature but inevitably underrepresents research produced in non-Anglophone journals and grey literature, particularly studies conducted by practitioners and government agencies in biodiversity-rich developing countries. The authors acknowledge this constraint implicitly through their discussion of epistemic asymmetry, noting that the dominance of the United States, Australia, China, the United Kingdom, and Canada in publication output does not necessarily reflect where the most severe visitor impacts occur, but rather where the capacity to publish in indexed venues is concentrated.

The temporal filter applied in the study is also instructive. The initial search returned 839 documents, but restricting the window to the ten full years from 2016 to 2025 reduced the final dataset to 684 publications, with 2026 excluded because indexing for that year was incomplete. This decision reflects a common challenge in bibliometric research: partial years can distort growth-rate calculations and citation statistics, since recently published papers have had little time to accumulate citations. The reported annual growth rate of 15.25% is therefore a conservative estimate of the field’s expansion, and the acceleration observed from 2019 onward coincides with rising global attention to sustainable tourism in the wake of overtourism debates and, subsequently, the post-pandemic surge in demand for outdoor recreation in natural settings.

The composition of the corpus provides additional insight into how knowledge in this field is produced and disseminated. Research articles accounted for 77.8% of the 684 documents, with reviews contributing 8.0%, book chapters 6.9%, and books 6.1%, while conference papers and editorial notes made up less than 1.5% combined. This profile suggests that the field is primarily driven by primary empirical research rather than synthesis, which the authors imply is both a strength and a limitation: a wealth of case studies exists, but comparatively few efforts have consolidated them into generalizable frameworks or predictive models that managers can apply across different protected area contexts.

The disciplinary spread of the literature also deserves attention. Although Environmental Science leads with 26.3% of publications, the substantial shares of Social Sciences at 19.7% and Business and Management at 15.5% indicate that research on ecotourism’s negative effects has never been purely ecological. Agricultural and Biological Sciences contributed 15.7% of the corpus, reflecting the discipline’s roots in studying vegetation trampling, soil compaction, and wildlife responses along trails and at campsites. The presence of economics and management-oriented publications underscores the tension the study identifies between visitor experience, revenue generation, and ecological integrity, a tension that optimization models for tourist itineraries have only partially resolved.

Recreation ecology itself has a longer intellectual history than the ten-year window of this analysis suggests. Classic studies cited in the article, including work on trail and campsite impacts dating back decades, established foundational principles that recent research has refined with new tools such as spatial modeling, remote sensing, and visitor-use monitoring. The bibliometric evidence that keyword co-occurrence clusters around ecotourism, protected areas, biodiversity, sustainability, recreation, and environmental conservation indicates that the field has broadened from its original biophysical focus toward socio-ecological integration, though the authors caution that genuinely interdisciplinary studies linking social and ecological dimensions remain scarce.

The findings carry practical implications for protected area managers. Because impacts concentrate at predictable hotspots—trails, campsites, picnic areas, and wildlife viewing sites—targeted interventions such as hardened surfaces, spatial zoning, visitor dispersal, and seasonal closures can address much of the documented damage without necessarily reducing overall visitation. The literature reviewed in the study also emphasizes that visitor use can facilitate the introduction of invasive species and alter wildlife habitat use and population densities, effects that require ongoing monitoring rather than one-time assessments. Adaptive management, in which monitoring data continuously inform visitor-use decisions, emerges as a recurring recommendation across the reviewed publications.

Finally, the study’s call for predictive simulation models connecting recreation ecology indicators with social well-being and participatory governance points toward the field’s likely trajectory. As climate change alters visitation patterns, species distributions, and ecosystem resilience in protected areas, the interactions between tourism pressure and environmental change will become increasingly complex. The authors argue that carrying capacity indicators and rigorous economic valuation tools must be embedded in decision-making processes, and that local and Indigenous communities should be treated as partners in knowledge production rather than merely as stakeholders affected by research conducted elsewhere. Whether the next decade of research can overcome the geographic and disciplinary imbalances documented in this analysis will largely determine whether ecotourism can fulfill its conservation promise in the world’s most biodiverse regions.

Subject of Research: Environmental impacts of ecotourism in protected areas from a recreation ecology perspective

Article Title: Negative effects of ecotourism in protected areas: a bibliometric analysis from a recreation ecology perspective

Article References: Huepa Briñez, J. A., Florez Yepes, G. Y., & Ospino, J. O. (2026). Negative effects of ecotourism in protected areas: a bibliometric analysis from a recreation ecology perspective. Nature Conservation, 64, 213-228. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.64.193686

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/natureconservation.64.193686

Keywords: ecotourism, protected areas, recreation ecology, biodiversity, sustainability, environmental conservation, bibliometric analysis, soil degradation, wildlife disturbance, carbon emissions, visitor management, Global South