"Leave Nothing but Footprints": Undergrowth Vegetation and Visitor Pressure

               In the process of researching understory vegetation for our urban ecology project, I came across a study by  Sikorski et al. that was interested in the effects of visitor pressure on the understory vegetation of forests. Prior to this study, other research has been done on the factors that contribute to an urban park’s species diversity of understory vegetation. The factors associated with the presence of visitors, also known as visitor pressure, are assumed to be the greatest contributor to declines in species diversity. However, no one had compared how species diversity decreases in trampled parks in ancient vs. recent forest stands. The authors of this study hypothesized that understory vegetation in park forest stands exposed to visitor pressure will decrease in species diversity.              The researchers analyzed the effects of visitor pressure ...