Harbour seals (Phoca Vitulina) and tourists in Iceland : Who´s watching who?

Sammanfattning: Wildlife tourism is at the moment a fast growing sector in the tourism industry. Therefore, there is a need for balancing the protecting of wildlife with the right of tourists and operators to use nature as a resource. Mutual exchange and acceptance of research results between biological- and tourism research has until recently been scarce. In this thesis, I have investigated interactions between harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) and tourists on Vatnsnes Peninsula, NW Iceland. In Paper I the effect of land-based seal watching on the haul-out behaviour and spatial distribution of harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) was investigated. In addition, the behaviour of tourists during seal watching was studied. The results showed that disturbance due to tourists caused an increased vigilance of the seals and affected their spatial distribution. The behaviour of tourists depended on group type with single tourists and couples behaving more passively compared to families and tourist groups of more than two adults. However, all tourist group types were significantly more active in an approaching zone than in the seal watching zone.The absence of discipline-independent guidance on how to manage wildlife tourism, in combination with a lack of knowledge-transfer from academia to the wildlife tourism sector regarding how human impact can be reduced, could contribute to unintended disturbance of wildlife. In Paper II we discuss how a synergetic gain of intergrading knowledge from different disciplines may occur and be implemented when it comes to managing wildlife tourism. We then present a method, where use and protection constitute equal interdisciplinary importance, when the aim is to create a sustainable relation between watchers and watched within wildlife tourism. The possibility is exemplified through an interdisciplinary academic approach, by combining the results found in Paper I with results derived from a tourist research study on the perception of tourists regarding wildlife. The combined results suggest that tourists do not always have a conscious idea of how to behave to minimise disturbance, underlining that focus should be put on education. We suggest how to transfer knowledge from academic research derived from the interdisciplinary approach to the industry through a teleological code of conduct.