Urban protected areas are increasingly significant for health and daily wellbeing of urban residents and for achieving nature protection goals. While visitation of those areas is continuously increasing as cities become denser, for visitors, the conservation purpose of these spaces remains often unknown or inconsequential. This presents a fundamental paradox in urban protected area management, balancing conservation with recreational use. Our research explores relationships between recreational activities, landscape characteristics and seasonality in an urban protected area in the boreal region with four seasons throughout the year. The study highlights that urban protected areas next to dense populations function as intensively used, multifunctional socio-ecological systems without seasonal rest periods. The findings indicate strong correlations between certain landscape characteristics and visitor diversity and density, e.g. multiple-stand forests are underused, trails are used most heavily, facilities have an important role of gathering visitors. Despite these correlations, our results highlight that understanding urban protected area visitation requires an analysis of factors outside the green space boundaries as external factors such as proximity to dense population also influence visitation. This study shows that in an urban setting green spaces are visited throughout the year and certain winter activities (skiing, sledding) are represented so heavily that they outweigh other summer activities in some areas annually. Effective conservation and recreation management therefore require continuous monitoring, management effort throughout all seasons, spatially differentiated strategies, and data-rich approaches capable of capturing complex temporal and behavioural dynamics.
Erit et al. (2026) studied this question.