• Have a parallel road to the main road with multiple crossroads in between; widen roads at places of frequent sightings
• Develop addl. locations; provide access to unique, inaccessible locations; divide Park into zones 
• Employ speed guns & penalise offenders; implement protocols to follow during sightings

In order to prevent overcrowding at the Yala National Park, targeted management-based actions to manage and decrease the traffic are required. Towards this end, one possibility is having a parallel road to the Yala Main Road with multiple crossroads between the two (the Sithulpawwa approach road from Kirinda could be easily co-opted for this purpose, by making it a Park-only-road and limiting Sithulpawwa access to the Kataragama side). 

Other actions that can be taken include: widening roads at places of frequent sightings so that vehicles can park on a side while others pass through; creating awareness among tourism providers and visitors; diversifying the visitor experience by developing additional locations where people can alight from vehicles; and providing access to unique locations that currently have little or no accessibility. On the other hand, dividing the Park into a few zones and providing guidelines as to by when visitors should exit each zone, based on the distance and permissible speeds, to make it to the gate by the deadline, could possibly address the issue of reckless driving and speeding while the random checking of vehicle speeds with a speed gun and penalising offenders would also help. The enforcement of conformity to a simple, easy to follow protocol, guidelines and regulations during sightings and to prevent the unruly behaviour of safari jeeps including not blocking through traffic (vehicles often block the entire road at locations of sightings, creating traffic jams and preventing the traffic flow), switching off engines, not shouting and limiting the time that best viewing positions are occupied, would be beneficial. 

These recommendations were made in a research article on ‘Is restricting mobile communication a solution to overcrowding? A test from the Yala National Park’ which was authored by P. Fernando, H.K. Janaka, M.K.C.R. De Silva and J. Pastorini (published in the Ceylon Journal of Science's 53rd Volume's Second Issue, last month).

Protected areas serve a dual function of conserving nature and providing nature based experiences to the public. They can, as mentioned in K. Higginbottom and A. Tribe's ‘Contributions of wildlife tourism to conservation’, be of major socio-economic importance, contributing significantly to national and local economies through tourism revenue and providing direct and indirect employment. 

However, tourism in protected areas may, as noted in R. Green and M. Giese's ‘Negative effects of wildlife tourism on wildlife’ also have negative consequences. Overcrowding at favoured sightings is one such issue that, as documented in studies conducted in Kenya (G. Karanja's ‘Tourism impacts in the Masai Mara National Reserve’) and the United States (US) (A.L. Timmons's ‘Too much of a good thing: Overcrowding at America’s national parks’), degrades the visitor experience and can negatively impact animals. With the rapid growth of nature based tourism, it is becoming an issue of increasing concern worldwide.

Tourism was the third highest foreign exchange earner for Sri Lanka in 2018 and wildlife parks were responsible for 17% of the public sector revenue from tourism (per the Tourism Development Authority's ‘Annual statistical report 2018’). The Yala National Park is the premier protected area in Sri Lanka and is visited by a large number of visitors. For example, in 2018, a total of 629,246 people visited the Park. Concerns regarding overcrowding in Yala have been expressed for over a decade.

The drawing of safari vehicles to locations of favoured sightings by information sharing through mobile communication may cause overcrowding in protected areas. Driving at high speed causing road kills, is an additional concern and maybe precipitated by rushing to locations of sightings. Yala is famous for Sri Lanka’s ‘big three’ – the leopard, the sloth bear and the Asian elephant – and visitors, as elaborated in U.M.I.R.K.  Weerasinghe, D. Kariyawasm and M. De Zoysa's ‘Ruhuna/Yala National Park: Visitors, visitation and eco-tourism’, place a premium on their sighting. The use of mobile phones to relay information of sightings and its impacts have been previously identified as a problem in Yala and banning mobile phone use has been suggested as a mitigation measure.

Study

Fernando et al. conducted a survey of visitor satisfaction at the Yala National Park with a particular emphasis on the perceived overcrowding and reckless driving, and assessed the impacts of switching off the mobile phone towers that cover the Park and the implications of the same for the Park management. The Yala National Park is situated in the South-Eastern coast. Yala is 979 square kilometres (km2) in extent and is divided into five ‘blocks’. Block I, the most visited area, is 141 km2 in extent and occupies the South-Western quadrant of the Park. Most people use commercial safari jeeps for Park visitation while a few do self drive safaris. Two mobile phone towers are located in Palatupana and Sithulpawwa at the perimeter of Block I, providing mobile coverage to the Park. Multiple network providers share the towers. The two mobile phone towers were switched on and off for a week at a time from July to August of 2015 at the request of the Department of Wildlife Conservation. Fernando et al. administered a questionnaire to groups exiting the Park on eight days between 19 July and 14 August 2015. 

The occupants of a safari vehicle were considered a ‘group’. The questionnaires were administered on the four days that the mobile towers were switched on and on the four days that they were switched off. Both data sets consisted of four different days (Monday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday). Vehicles exiting the Park were given a questionnaire (in English), which the visitors filled out anonymously and on their own. A single questionnaire was handed over to each vehicle. No assessment was made as to whether the responses reflected the views of the person filling out the questionnaire or the consensus of all the occupants. Respondents were asked to rank their experience using a five-point scale ranging from ‘excellent’, 'good', 'average', 'poor' to ‘terrible’. Observations on vehicle speed were made during a total of 17.6 hours on five different days from a vehicle parked on the side of the Yala Main Road. The speed of the passing vehicles was subjectively assessed and listed under four categories (approximate speed: slow - less than 20 km per hour [km/h]; normal - 20–30 km/h; fast - 30–50 km/h; and very fast - over 50 km/h). The time of day was noted for each vehicle. Fernando et al. checked the mobile signal of the three main service providers, Dialog, Mobitel (now Sri Lanka Telecom-Mobitel) and Etisalat (now Hutch), at 36 different locations along the most used roads within the Park by using a mobile phone. The signal strength at each location was noted based on the number of bars (zero–five) indicated on the phone.

Results 

Responses were received from 936 groups. 

On their overall experience, 302/32.9% considered it ‘excellent’, 413/44.9% ‘good’, 160/17.4% ‘average’, 31/3.4% ‘poor’ and 14/1.4% ‘terrible’, while 16 groups did not answer. There were no significant differences in the level of experience on the four different days. 

Groups from 53 countries visited the Park during the survey period of eight days. The highest number of groups was from China (173), followed by the Netherlands (126). Sri Lanka was the third with 116 groups followed by the United Kingdom (98). 

In assessing visitor satisfaction in relation to the country of origin, the five countries with more than 50 visitor groups were treated individually while all the other countries were lumped together by continent (Africa, the Middle East, America, Asia and Europe). The level of satisfaction was influenced by nationality. The most dissatisfied visitors came from Africa and the Middle East, 5% of whom thought that the experience was ‘terrible’ while another 20% that it was ‘poor’. The most appreciative visitors were from Australia where two thirds (67.9%) felt that they had an ‘excellent’ experience. From China, Australia and all the European countries, more than 75% reported either a ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ experience. About one third of the respondents from America (30.4%), Sri Lanka (32.1%) and other Asian countries (33.3%) had an ‘average’ experience. 

About half of the groups (52.3%) stated that there was overcrowding at the sightings. However, the perception of overcrowding did not significantly alter the rating of the overall experience. 

Reckless driving was reported by 17.2% of the respondent groups, with more groups noting that reckless driving creates a terrible or poor experience. However, reckless driving did not significantly alter the overall visitor experience. 

About one third of the groups spotted leopard (34.5%) and/or bear (36.1%). The satisfaction of the visitors was significantly higher if they spotted a leopard with 48.5% rating it as excellent versus 24.8% rating it as excellent without seeing a leopard. Also, the sighting of a bear significantly changed the overall assessment with 43.3% reporting an excellent experience after seeing a bear versus 27.2% giving an excellent rating without having encountered one. Most (97.4%) had sightings of elephants. Spotting an elephant did not cause a significant difference in the overall experience. The respondents were significantly more satisfied with their visit if they saw the ‘big three’. Of the 15/1.6% groups that did not see any of the ‘big three’, 20% rated the experience as excellent and 26.7% as good, while 13.3% thought that it was terrible. Of the 126 groups who had seen all of the ‘big three’, 56.4% had an excellent and 39.7% a good experience. Only five/4% felt that the experience was average and none rated it as poor or terrible. 

The speed of 361 vehicles was assessed, of which 19.4% were categorised as slow, 55.4% as normal, 19.4% as fast and 5.8% as very fast. There was a significant difference in speed related to the time of day. Speeding vehicles were mostly observed in the 5 p.m. - 7 p.m. time slot, with more than half of the vehicles monitored going fast (30.7%) or very fast (25.3%). Speeding was particularly high between 6 p.m. - 6.30 p.m. For all the other time periods, normal speed was the most commonly recorded (53.5%-72.1%). 

The mobile signal was detectable within the Park with the two towers switched off at 19 of the locations checked for Dialog (52.8%), at 17 locations for Mobitel (47.2%) and at 16 locations for Etisalat (44.4%). For Dialog, the average signal strength at the 36 locations was one plus/minus 1.17 (range zero-four), for Mobitel it was 0.86 ± 1.13 (range 0–4) and for Etisalat it was 0.97 ± 1.42 (range 0–5). Having normal mobile coverage did not make a difference in the probability of seeing elephants, which were seen by 97.7% when the mobile towers were on and by 96.2% when they were off. With normal mobile coverage, there was a significantly greater probability of seeing a leopard or a bear. When the mobile towers were on, 51.1% spotted a leopard and when they were off, 15.6% saw a leopard. With the towers on, 54.7% saw a bear and when off, 31.9% saw the same. The rating of the experience between the days with or without the mobile towers on, was significantly different with more groups reporting an ‘excellent’ instead of a ‘good’ experience on the days that the towers were on. On the days with the towers on, significantly more overcrowding was reported (61.7 vs. 45%). There was no difference in the reporting of reckless driving between days on which the mobile towers were switched on or off.