High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Tourism carrying capacity is a now antiquated approach to managing visitors in protected areas and national parks which evolved out of the fields of range, habitat and wildlife management. In these fields, managers attempted to determine the largest population of a particular species that could be supported by a habitat over a long period of time. Many authors, such as Buckley, Wagar, Washburne, McCool, and Stankey have critiqued the concept as being fatally flawed in both the conceptual assumptions made and its limited practical application. For example, the notion of a carrying capacity assumes the world, such as the social-ecological systems in which protected areas and tourism destinations are situated, are stable. But we know they are dynamically complex and impossible to predict. We know that to implement a carrying capacity on a practical level, assumes a level of control of entries into a destination or protected area not usually...