Skalnaté pleso is the most frequently visited place in a whole Slovakian Tatra National Park. That is because of the cable cars operating in this area. Apart from that, there are also 4 tourist trails in the area of Łomnicki Staw, which enables tourist dispersion from the research site to the other neighbouring mountain areas. Since visitor monitoring brings a lot of benefits from the perspective of protected area management, monitoring studies are priority for the protected areas managers. Monitoring research methods are divided into 4 main categories : direct on-site observations, on-site automatic countings, visit registrations and inferred counts (Cessford, Muhar 2003 ). The aim of this article is to present the role of field works in the visitor monitoring studies in the mountain protected areas. For the author’s studies, it is planned to use methods from all of the basic categories, since each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. Most of the methods used by the author involve field works but only their combination with methods of statistical analysis allows for getting reliable information about visitors in protected areas, together with their spatial and qualitative distribution
