National Visitor Use Monitoring Results

In recent years, outdoor recreation has become increasingly important on national forests across the United States. As a result, Forest Service managers provide a diverse set of recreation opportunities to the public and there is greater recognition of the economic activity that public recreation can generate in local communities. Accurate visitation estimates are required for national, regional, and forest-level decisionmaking and planning. Specifically, the estimators are needed to determine benefits and impacts of recreational use on other forest resources and local economies. Estimates also are needed to determine outdoor recreation trends and to quantify the effectiveness of Federal programs. However, prior to the creation of the National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) Program in 2000 (English and others 2002), no statistically based, uniformly applied methodology was used to estimate national forest recreation visitation.