The American public is showing an escalating interest in public, outdoor recreation opportunities as residents increase demand for natural spaces across hundreds of millions of acres of federally owned lands and waters.
The Department of the Interior (DOI) recently released the Interagency Recreation Visitation Data Report – a first-of-its-kind document exploring recreation visitation rates for public, outdoor areas. The report catalogued data across 11 activity categories, compiling a relevant and comparable data set across multiple agencies that connect the popular interest in nature-based recreation.
According to the report, outdoor recreation opportunities contribute $1.2 trillion in economic output, support five million jobs and deliver 2.3% of the nation’s gross domestic product annually. It was published as directed by the EXPLORE Act – a piece of legislation requiring federal agencies to publish yearly reports on visitation at select federal recreation areas.
Notably, the EXPLORE Act signaled land and water management agencies to conduct novel ways to measure recreation on public lands – prioritizing activities that have been historically challenging to gauge. These solutions leverage technological and digital innovation to track and consolidate data across multiple fronts, including:
- Mobile devices.
- Automated counters.
- On-site observations.
- GPS units.
- Questionnaires.
- Game cameras.
- Community science.
- Social media.
Data collected across these previously underutilized avenues will provide critical insight into how the public engages with outdoor recreational opportunities. To further those ends, the Federal Interagency Council on Outdoor Recreation identified 40 pilot initiatives across an array of landscapes and recreation environments to inform decision making processes. Going forward, agencies will be able to use these data points to enhance resource allocation, identify emerging trends and optimize management strategies.
The following represent a selection of those pilots:
The DOI and National Park Service (NPS) will conduct a visitor movement study at the Richmond National Battlefield and Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site in Virgina. The parks have undergone significant changes over the past decade, impacting visitor foot traffic and staff retention. The study provides park managers with empirical data using commercially available mobility data from phones alongside automated on-site counters. The data may then be used to help develop operational plans, make decisions about visitor center projects and management and establish an understanding of current and future visitor use.
The DOI and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will utilize digital mobility data to estimate visitation rates on federally owned land nationwide. Methods will include leveraging social media, mobile device location, automated on-site counters and visitor-provided information to paint a clearer picture of attendance at 70 remote BLM sites. The study determined that mobile device data alone wasn’t sufficient to accurately portray visitation rates but could be valuable when combined with a larger statistical model to cover gaps.
The DOI and NPS will advance a pilot to evaluate more than 1,000 acres of national mall and memorial parkland, prioritizing the Washington D.C. area. Through mobile device and both manual and automated counting, the pilot will evaluate procedures used to effectively determine how many visitors are visiting each location. The study will:
- Evaluate counting procedures using mobility data.
- Review current counting equipment.
- Recommend new counters where necessary.
- Create an online dashboard to view use levels across the park.
Photo by Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, from Wikimedia Commons
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