Mountain protected areas are characterized by high biodiversity, which makes it a great challenge for managers to maintain a balance between their use and the stability of natural ecosystems. Maintaining that balance is particularly difficult in areas with high tourism pressure. The expected volume of tourist traffic should be considered at the planning stage of the tourist infrastructure development process. Insufficient capacity of tourist infrastructure can lead to environmental degradation, which is hard, or at times impossible, to repair. In our research, we identified patterns of tourist footpath and road functioning in an environmentally protected area with high volumes of tourist traffic. Data from geomorphologic mapping was analyzed in order to identify tourist footpath and road structures in the Tatra National Park (TNP). Fieldwork was conducted in several stages between 1995 and 2019. Orthophotomaps from the years 1977, 2009, 2017 and 2019 were used to identify and compare degraded zones along selected tourist footpaths. Degraded zones were defined as areas surrounding a footpath or tourist road with a mean width larger than or equal to 10 meters, with heavily damaged or completely removed vegetation and exposed, weathered cover, where geomorphic processes that would not take place under normal conditions are readily observable. The examined tourist footpaths and roads vary in terms of their morphometric parameters. Research has shown important differences between mean and maximum footpath width as well as maximum incision depth for the forest zone versus the subalpine and alpine zones. A lack of differences in these parameters was noted between the alpine and subalpine zones. Research has shown that an increase in the surface area of degraded zones found adjacent to tourist footpaths occurred in all the studied geo-ecological zones in the study period. However, the largest increase occurred atop wide ridgelines found in the alpine zone. Degraded zones may be an indication of exceeding the tourist carrying capacity of a mountain tourist area. Mass tourism in TNP contributes to the formation of degraded zones adjacent to footpaths, whose continuous evolution may lead to irreversible changes in local relief.

Forest roads in mountain areas have a significant impact on the changes of water circulation and cause the development of numerous erosion and accumulation forms. The aim of the study was to investigate the magnitude of geomorphic changes within forest roads, determine the factors influencing it, and assess the rate of erosion/accumulation within these roads. Geomorphological mapping of forest roads (6.2 km) was conducted. Roads were divided into homogeneous morphogenetic sections, and a set of parameters was measured for each of them. In order to determine the main factors responsible for relief changes within the roads, the Principal Component Analysis was used. The t-test for two independent samples was also used to check the influence of the bedrock type on the geomorphic changes within roads. Repeated cross-sectional profile measurements were conducted to determine the intensity of erosion and accumulation processes. Our results show that the magnitude of geomorphic changes within forest roads mostly depends on the presence of subsurface flow interception from the cutslope, which in most cases occurs when a road is constructed across a convergent slope area. The strength of the bedrock also has a significant impact on relief transformations, which is expressed in the higher amount of accumulation and erosion features, and higher dissection depths within weaker rocks. The highest annual rate of road deepening is 10 cm yr⁻¹.