Counting on Recreation Use Data: A Call for Long-Term Monitoring

What is the Use of Use Data? While the theory of recreation benefits and satisfaction has legitimately moved a long way from simple body counts to focus on visitor outcomes, experiences and the satisfaction of underlying needs, long term recreation visitation data is still crucial. Such data is essential for assessing visitor impacts to the resource, facilities planning, budgeting, calculating economic contribution that tourism provides and estimating economic value of the recreation experience to the visitor themselves. Government agencies that supply outdoor recreation have been slow to recognize the importance of consistently collected and defensible use data, however. The consequences of not having good recreation data are substantial. Without good visitor use data, recreation fares poorly in budget allocations for management, replacement of facilities, expansion of facilities, acquisition of lands for recreation and allocation of natural resources such as water flows. Other competing uses of agencies available budget often prevail when they have better data on what they produce. If we don't even know the number of customers we serve, how can agencies be customer oriented? If we don't know the baseline visitation, how can we measure the benefits of enhancing recreation site quality or programs (Loomis and Walsh, 1997). On multiple use lands managers are told the number of board feet and the number of cattle using an area, but recreation use is often merely described as high or low. In wildlife management, agencies continue to emphasize management of game animals because of documented use, while the growing popularity of non-game wildlife recreation is often given limited attention because agencies don't even know how many people visit specific areas for that purpose. Even when agencies do count visitors, the procedures are so variable from year to year, that we don't know if the change in reported visitor use levels signals a new trend or a new ranger making the counts. When recreation specialists are pushed to "give us a number" such "ballpark" estimates often lack credibility with the public or competing resource user groups. This was brought to a head in the U.S. Forest Service when the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture began quoting the agency's conclusion that recreation produced far more than half the jobs, income and value of the National Forest System. The timber industry challenged such a conclusion based, in large part, on the lack of documented visitor use estimates (Scahllau, et al.). These authors compared U.S. Forest Service visitor use estimates to the more objective estimates of National Parks and concluded the U.S. Forest Service had overestimated use. But no one really knows. Even the U.S. Forest Service's Wilderness visitor statistics are admittedly suspect as only 15% are based on actual counts (Cole, 1996). Yet Wilderness management to maintain environmental quality and naturalness depends on relating visitor use to impacts. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is even worse in their visitor counts. BLM's visitor counting at Wilderness areas is such a low priority that their estimates are gross undercounts of visitation. The database system is so unavailable to field personnel, that the neglect feeds on itself. Why bother to collect visitor use figures when you can't even access the database? Yet Wilderness designation is one of the most contentious faced by BLM but they can't produce analyses comparable to other resources because they have no data. Some Solutions KISS Methods Counting visitors is not rocket science and some agencies have developed cost-effective sampling designs and strategies to consistently collect visitor use data at their sites. First and foremost is for the agency to recognize that it can use sampling, it does not need a census of all visitors at all sites. Careful selection of a representative set of recreation areas, entry points or sites would allow generalizing the results to all the recreation areas in a given State or region. …