land Article Visitor Counting and Monitoring in Forests Using Camera Traps: A Case Study from Bavaria (Southern Germany) Gerd Lupp 1,*, Valerie Kantelberg 2,3, Bernhard Förster 1, Carolina Honert 1, Johannes Naumann 1, Tim Markmann 1 and Stephan Pauleit 1 1 Chair for Strategic Landscape Planning and Management, Technical University of Munich, Emil-Ramann-Str. 6, 85354 Freising, Germany;
[email protected] (B.F.);
[email protected] (C.H.);
[email protected] (J.N.);
[email protected] (T.M.);
[email protected] (S.P.) 2 Agency for Food, Agriculture and Forestry, Simon-Breu-Str. 21, 97074 Würzburg, Germany;
[email protected] 3 Bavarian State Institute for Forestry, Hans-Carl-von-Carlowitz-Platz 1, 85354 Freising, Germany * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +49-(0)8161-71-4780 Abstract: A variety of counting methods exist to analyze visitor numbers of outdoor settings such as national parks, recreation areas and urban green spaces, with sensor-based approaches being the most frequently applied. In this paper, we describe the application and practicality of camera traps originally designed for wildlife monitoring for visitor management purposes. The focus of the work is on the practicality of trigger camera traps and data collection for visitor monitoring from a more practice- and management-oriented perspective. Camera traps can provide interesting in-depth and detailed information about recreationists and are flexible and suitable for various uses; however, assessing the visual data manually requires significant staff and working time. To deal with Citation: Lupp, G.; Kantelberg, V.; the large amounts of data gathered for numbers of passersby and recreation activities, correlation Förster, B.; Honert, C.; Naumann, J.; Markmann, T.; Pauleit, S.