Abstract

Conception Island National Park is a remote park in the central Bahamas. It is administered by the Bahamas National Trust, an NGO tasked with managing the National Park system of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. Conception Island is known as a “paper park” since it has no monitoring system, no warden, and no way of tracking visitation or visitor activity. I used daily satellite imagery from the company Planet® to characterize boat traffic visitation to Conception Island nearly every day going back to 2016. I obtained a total of 3,003 observations, with 1,200 vessels located, from which I was able to map each vessel that visited the island over this time period, as well as the length of the vessels. This provides the first analysis of visitation to Conception Island and will be extremely useful as management plans are formalized for the Park. I was able to discover that peak visitorship to the island occurs in the spring when migrating songbirds arrive at the island, and when white-tailed tropicbirds are using the island for mating. I also found that visitorship remains constant around the year, but drops sharply during the hurricane season. I hope this data collection method can be used in combination with knowledge of the island’s wildlife to aid park personnel in choosing when and how they allow access to the island, and gain more knowledge of threats to the island such as poaching and drug trafficking.

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