Appalachian Trail – Challenges

If you’re planning to take a walk in the woods a long walk, then the Appalachian Trail, running from Georgia to Maine, is a prime destination. But the popularity for the trail has led to a number of challenges. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Marion: the Appalachian Trail has grown in popularity over the years.

Research Biologist Jeff Marion is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech.

Marion: Just in the last 10 or so years, we’ve begun to experience increasing management problems associated with the very heavy and very intensive visitation, particularly in certain areas the Appalachian Trail.
And so when you have areas along the Appalachian Trail that are intensively or heavily visited, sometimes you begin to have visitor impact problems. And these are resource impacts. And examples of these would be for the trail tread itself, you can develop soil loss and erosion of soil. You can develop mudiness problems and trail widening. If you have mud holes or deep eroded sections, people tend to walk around them. and that makes the trail wider. So those are impacts to the trail. Other impacts that that are particularly troublesome relate to camping. With more and more people we need more campsites. Sometimes these campsites can grow very very large in size. And so you have tremendous amounts of just bare exposed soil. And when you have rainstorms, that soil can wash away and oftentimes these campsites are on the shorelines of mountain streams that might support trout and other invertebrate species and fishes and the soils can do great harm when they wash into these sensitive mountain streams.

In our next program a look at how managers are trying to minimize the impacts of increased visitation on the Appalachian trail. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Appalachian Trail - Challenges

America's most famous hike is experiencing growing pains.

Air Date:01/06/2017

Scientist:

Transcript:

Appalachian Trail - Challenges

If you're planning to take a walk in the woods a long walk, then the Appalachian Trail, running from Georgia to Maine, is a prime destination. But the popularity for the trail has led to a number of challenges. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Marion: the Appalachian Trail has grown in popularity over the years.

Research Biologist Jeff Marion is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech.

Marion: Just in the last 10 or so years, we've begun to experience increasing management problems associated with the very heavy and very intensive visitation, particularly in certain areas the Appalachian Trail.
And so when you have areas along the Appalachian Trail that are intensively or heavily visited, sometimes you begin to have visitor impact problems. And these are resource impacts. And examples of these would be for the trail tread itself, you can develop soil loss and erosion of soil. You can develop mudiness problems and trail widening. If you have mud holes or deep eroded sections, people tend to walk around them. and that makes the trail wider. So those are impacts to the trail. Other impacts that that are particularly troublesome relate to camping. With more and more people we need more campsites. Sometimes these campsites can grow very very large in size. And so you have tremendous amounts of just bare exposed soil. And when you have rainstorms, that soil can wash away and oftentimes these campsites are on the shorelines of mountain streams that might support trout and other invertebrate species and fishes and the soils can do great harm when they wash into these sensitive mountain streams.

In our next program a look at how managers are trying to minimize the impacts of increased visitation on the Appalachian trail. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.