Journal of Oceanography and Marine Research
Open Access

The direct and indirect environmental impacts from tourism in a Small Island, Hsiao Liuqiu, Taiwan

International Conference on Coastal Zones

May 16-18, 2016 Osaka, Japan

Jeng-Di Lee, Chih-Ting Hsu and Chia-Fa Chi

National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: Oceanography

Abstract :

Small islands are highly developmental areas for tourism. A small island, Hsiao Liuqiu in Taiwan has folded its tourist numbers four-times in the last ten years and the number of the tourists now is up to 600 thousands per year officially. Therefore, there is a need to understand the impacts caused directly and indirectly by the fast developed tourism. We had conducted a three-year survey focused on three parts of the island, i.e., intertidal zone biodiversity, road-killed land crabs populations, and natural habitats on land to check the causes and the trends of impacts. Several investigating skills were used in this study, such as some qualitative research methods, questionnaire, interview and direct observation and quantified data for land crab population estimation. The impacts made by the tourist in the survey sites of intertidal zone showed the scale is still covered in natural successional change. The land crabs populations are significantly directly impacted by increasing number of tourists since it comes along with the increasing number of motorcycles. However, the loss of natural habitats seems to not make indirect impacts on the land crabs populations and intertidal biodiversity in our study. A strong norm from local culture for land use could explain this indirect effect. The norm regulated the distribution of new accommodation buildings for tourism. After we had checked out the impacts, we also introduced some mitigative and adaptive measures for the impacts into the island�s integrated coastal management.

Biography :

Jeng-Di Lee is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Ocean and Coastal Management in National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU). His Doctoral degree on the Philippines coastal management had been completed from King’s College London, in which applied a political ecology approach. He published a new book, ‘The Coastal Management in Taiwan: Impacts and Conflicts’ in 2015.

Email: ottolee@mail.nsysu.edu.tw