Framework for the assessment

In 1974 the United States Congress established a process for assessing the state of the forest and range resources in this country through passage of the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act (RPA). The RPA directed the secretary of agriculture to assess the demand, supply and condition of all forest and range resources in the United States and to submit the first of these assessments by December 31, 1975. A five-year update to this first assessment was mandated for 1979. The act then directed the secretary to establish an ongoing process for updating the national RPA assessment every 10 years after reporting the findings from the 1979 assessment. The intention of the RPA assessment was and is to describe recent trends, current condition and likely futures for timber, water, wildlife and fish, range, minerals, and outdoor recreation and wilderness in the United States. This book represents the fourth of the outdoor recreation and wilderness studies done to meet the mandates of the 1974 RPA. The other studies covering the other resource areas mentioned above are published elsewhere by the specialists covering each of those areas. The scale of outdoor recreation and wilderness assessments prior to this one was primarily national. Secondarily, as was possible given data limitations, regional differences were described and interpreted. As the assessment process has evolved and capabilities have progressed from the first one in 1975, demands for regional information have grown. While the overall national picture is still very much of interest and is the major focus of this assessment, more emphasis has been placed on identifying regional differences and on examining geographic patterns of the primary study variables at the scale of individual counties. The makeup of the four assessment regions is shown in Figure 11.1. More easily accessible data at county level and advances in GIS tools for microcomputers have now made county-scale examinations of geographic patterns of outdoor recreation and wilderness resources and uses feasible. This assessment of outdoor recreation and wilderness provides national, regional and county-scale results. Past assessments also focused on comparing demand and supply trends through a constructed “gap” analysis. The gap of reference was the difference between demand for outdoor recreation and wilderness opportunities and the supply of these opportunities. Chapter IV of the 1989 assessment was devoted to such a gap analysis (Cordell, et al., 1990). This had been the traditional econometric approach to identifying imbalances between supply and demand where such differences could be viewed as problems, or opportunities, for setting policies and programs to better match demand and supply. While the RPA assessment has always been carefully designed to deal only with fact finding and non-prescriptive interpretation, findings indicating gaps between demand and supply were found useful in identifying areas where policy changes could be considered. Indeed, this is the reason for conducting such an assessment in the first place.