Abstract
Ecotourism has sometimes been criticised as a paradoxical industry, whereby visitors to an area for the purpose of immersion in a local wilderness have an inherently negative effect on the ecosystem and wildlife therein. However, results of studies investigating such impacts are decidedly mixed. One aspect that has been somewhat overlooked in ecotourism research is that of noise, and especially how fluctuations of overall visitors might contribute to background noise present in an area. Furthermore, we do not understand how these noise levels and/or spatially variable human activity within an ecotourist hotspot influence species richness and/or overall assemblages. Here, we use passive acoustic recording over a period of nine months to observe how occupancy, species richness and the make-up of bird assemblages varied over time, especially across periods that correspond with high and low levels of human visitors at a popular ecotourist resort situated within a UNESCO world heritage site and an Important Bird Area as designated by Birdlife International. We found that detected species richness did not fluctuate according to peak tourist periods, however background noise levels were highest during peak tourist season, especially proximate to the main resort buildings. Species assemblages were analysed using non-parametric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) and these were found to be significantly different not only according to spatial proximity to the resort, but also across periods of high and low tourist activity. Thus, while overall bird diversity does not appear to be sensitive to tourist numbers, the composition of species groups is likely highly influenced by such activities. This has implications for the development and maintenance of ecotourist infrastructure attempting to support visitors potentially aiming to see rare or sensitive bird species in an area, and highlights that anthropogenic noise should be considered in the context of the ecotourism industry.