Objectives

  

Figure 1.6: Main objectives of this study.

The main objectives of this study are outlined in figure 1.6. To test the hypotheses in figure 1.5, one needs to have a system with which one can conduct experiments. Conducting these experiments on a real boat traffic system would be highly impractical if not impossible. By creating a computer simulation, one has an environment in which various hypotheses about recreational boat traffic can be tested.

The specific objectives of this study are:

1.

Create a working computer model of a recreational boat traffic system.

2.

Test the hypothesis that boat traffic activities are randomly placed in space and time.

3.

Test the hypotheses that boat traffic is associated with specific features in the boating environment, namely:

• Source areas
• Channels
• Passes
• Seagrass Beds

4.

If 3 is not rejected, enumerate how much information about overall boat traffic can be obtained from observations around key features.

Each of these steps will be described in detail in the methodology section of this study, however, there are some points that merit discussion at this point.

1.

Computer model of boat traffic system: Simulation is a very broad subject, and there is a very broad notion of what it means to ``model'' or ``simulate'' a system. Even the definition of what one considers the system to be modeled is an inherently subjective decision, since the model and the simulation are exercises in hard-coding of one's assumptions about that which one is modeling (King and Kraemer, 1993). To answer the questions posed in figure 1.5, it is imperative that a simulation provide information about spatial expression and extent of common recreational activities. With this in mind, it is a specific objective of this study to simulate boat traffic in a way that provides explicit cartographic representation of these activities, as paths on a map of a boating region.

2.

Hypothesis of randomness in boat traffic: Once an acceptable simulation of boat traffic is produced, I would like to address the question of whether boat traffic activities (and their expression in paths and destinations) are uniformly or randomly occurring throughout a boat traffic system. This would have implications in the type of strategy one would choose to monitor a system, for if a process is uniform through space, then one can sample a very small portion and predict with confidence what is happening in the system as a whole. If boat activity is essentially random through a boating area, then one would need to consider one of two approaches to monitoring: observing the entire system simultaneously (possibly from an aircraft), or sampling random locations in a boating system in a way that reflects the variability of the population being observed. This could be tested by comparing boat traffic patterns that result from realistic behavior to the results of boat traffic patterns that would have been produced by random or ``aimless'' behavior (random walk). If one assumes that boating behavior that is not random would show some association or ``clumping'' of behavior in space, then one would expect a measure of differences between distances of paths of individual boats to be different in ``realistic'' behaviors and ``random'' behavior. If no difference can be measured, one could not reject the possibility that boating behavior is essentially random.

3.

Hypothesis of association of boat activities to features in the boating environment: If boating behavior proves not to be random, then the next question to be answered is whether it is associated with readily discernible features in a boating environment. If there is an association, one would expect to see boating activity concentrated around these features. Some features are self-evident, such as passes through which all boat traffic must pass to enter or leave a confined area. Other associations are the subject of reasonable conjecture (such as association of anchoring with sheltered areas), but have never been established in the literature.