STATE OF THE ART AND OPPORTUNITIES OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF COMMUNICATION IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL INTERPRETATION : Case of Saimaa protected areas

Abstract

This Bachelor thesis is commissioned by Metsähallitus Natural Heritage Services, Southern Finland area, Recreation process. One of the missions of this service is to provide environmental education and interpretation in national parks, protected areas, information point and information hut. New technol-ogies of communication give the opportunity to extend that mission both in space and time by com-municating with the visitors before, during and after the visit of the protected areas. However, those new media have their own specificity that must be considered before using those for environmental interpretation.

The aim of this thesis was to understand the methodology of environmental interpretation and find what principles and techniques are applicable to which new technology of communication in the Saimaa protected areas. Therefore, a literature review was done for both environmental interpretation and new technologies of communication that revealed the importance of knowing users expectations and social media characteristics. A visitor survey was realised for researching visitor’s values, activities and use of technology. This visitor survey revealed that few customers are using social media in their travel, but they are interested by that possibility and the tendency could rapidly change in the future.

Tips and techniques were proposed for environmental interpretation using social media. Facebook is the only social media that is specifically used for Saimaa protected areas communication. This social network has been analysed using those tips and techniques. The results show that if Metsähallitus is doing well with Facebook, there are still place for improvements. Solutions have been proposed for the improvement of environmental interpretation using Facebook.

Those protected areas are absent from other social medias and new technologies of communication. The opportunities and threats of those media have been analysed using SWOT analysis and the visitor survey. The results showed that media-sharing and blogs are good opportunities but micro-blogging and mobile application will be more difficult to use for environmental interpretation due to their tech-nical characteristics. A combination of different social media would be the best solution.