Parks, Protected Areas and Recreation Group

The Parks, protected areas and recreation research group investigates policy, planning and management issues for all types of protected areas, with focus on Canada and some comparative work with European initiatives. Lately, the focus also includes marine protected areas on the Pacific Coast and the Canadian Arctic.

Recreation research focuses on the entire range of motorized and non-motorized recreation opportunities available in British Columbia. The group also specializes on human dimensions research in the wider sense, such as recreational fishing, ecosystem valuation and relationships to climate change.

One major direction of the work relies on empirical social sciences, including choice modelling, a method that allows the modelling of trade-off behaviour and the preference based exploration of currently non-existing planning or development alternatives.