The trouble with looking at total numbers is it may not adequately address the question. Taking these numbers, this assertion, of a ban being reasonable, has an unwritten underlying assumption that the 150,000 hammocks are all hung on the same set of two trees. This equals a hammock hung every 3 minutes 24 hours a day 365 days/year. That does not seam reasonable. So, how many hang sites at a given park are there? One assumption would be there are 150,000 sets of trees. Each set is used once per year. If a hammock is hung on a set of trees once per year make an outright ban very understandable? In truth the answer is neither of these extremes. We do not know how often an individual tree is used to hang a hammock.
One set of data is from Great Smokey Mts NP. Their
park usage data says that the developed campsites are occupied 225 days per year with an average stay of 3.5 days. Assuming 1/2 of all campers hang a hammock. on the same set of trees. That set of trees would experience only 32 hammocks hangs per year. Is hanging a hammock once every 11 1/2 days make an outright ban on all hammocks understandable? I'll answer for me. I do not know.
But to answer you question directly... I do not know. I am completely ignorant, if 15M visitors to a park would or would not kill any trees through hammock use. Thus, again the need for a study and actual data.
Thank you arutha for you post. Thinking about this more, perhaps, I should write up a NSF grant proposal to study this problem. The proposal will obviously have to include funding for many, many nights of field research. Plus travel expenses across the county to visit many parks and could take years to compose the proper data set.
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