Whale Shark Tourism: Impacts on Coral Reefs in the Philippines
@article{Wong2018WhaleST, title={Whale Shark Tourism: Impacts on Coral Reefs in the Philippines}, author={C. W. Martin Wong and Inga E. Conti-Jerpe and Laurie J. Raymundo and Caroline Dingle and Gonzalo Araujo and Alessandro Ponzo and David M. Baker}, journal={Environmental Management}, year={2018}, volume={63}, pages={282-291} }
Reef-based tourism has been developing rapidly in recent decades yet its impacts on reef ecosystems are often overlooked. In Tan-awan, Oslob, Philippines, whale sharks are attracted to the shallow reefs where they are provisioned up to 50 tons y−1 of feed and this phenomenon in turn attracts >300,000 y−1 visitors. Given the intensive provisioning and concentrating tourism activities, we hypothesized that the whale shark tourism-impacted site (IS) will have greater impacts on reef degradation…
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