Excerpt from Recreation Opportunities and Problems in the National Forests of the Northern and Intermountain Regions as They Relate to the Development of a Research Program People are becoming increasingly aware of recreation Opportunities in the national forests of the Northern and Intermountain Regions1 (fig. This includes not only the general public, but Congress and national forest administrators as well. Not so long ago recreation was a minor partner in multiple-use management of the national forests. Today, however, it is beginning to receive its full share of emphasis in management decisions. The new emphasis is not because national forest recreation is itself new. Actually, these public lands were something of a playground long before the first white men came, and we have written evidence that at least some of the early settlers took time out from the business of survival to relax on lands that are now national forests. More than a century ago, for example, Utah pioneers drove their wagons up into the mountains to escape the oppressive summer heat of the lower valleys in which they lived. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Trail users in four geographical regions have been classified into clusters of recreation activities: day hiking, undeveloped recreation, and camping-hiking. The regions are grouped as Appalachian, Pacific, Rocky Mountain, and Southwestern. Distance, time traveled, and time at site varied depending on the mix of activities. Average distance traveled remained approximately the same for all groups when substitute sites were available. However, visitors in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific regions indicated these were no alternative sites, or they were unaware of any.

Excerpt from Predicting the Durability of Forest Recreation Sites in Northern Utah: Preliminary Results One of the more serious problems facing recreation site managers today, particularly on campground and picnic areas; is that of maintaining adequate ground cover. This is an especially difficult task in semiarid regions such as the Intermountain West, where sites tend to support a sparse cover of ground-level vegetation. Because of different soil, moisture, and topographic conditions, some sites are much more durable than others in terms of the persistence of ground - cover vegetation. If we had tools for rating the durability of potential recreation sites, less durable sites either could be avoided or designed and managed in ways to increase their durability. Moreover, knowledge of the probable level of vegetation damage to a fragile site might allow managers to estimate any additional expenditures that may be needed if such a site is developed and used as a campground or picnic area. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This analysis examines the problem of measuring demand for recreation on national forests and other public lands. Current measures of recreation demand in Forest Service resource assessments and planning emphasize population-level participation rates and activity-based economic values for visitor days. Alternative measures and definitions of recreation demand are presented, including formal economic demand and multiattribute preferences. Recreation assessments from national-level Renewable Resources Planning Act Assessments to site-level demand studies are reviewed to identify methods used for demand analysis at different spatial scales. A finding throughout the multiple scales of analysis, with the exception of site-level studies, is that demand measures are not integrated with supply measures. Supply analyses, in the context of resource assessments, have taken the form of mapped spatial inventories of recreation resources on the national forests, based on the classification of recreational settings according to the opportunities they produce (e.g., the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum). As such, integration of demand analysis with these measures of supply requires measuring the demand for recreational settings. To support management and planning decisions, recreation demand analysis must also permit projection of changes in visitation at multiple scales as changes in management and policy alter recreational settings, and as the demographics and behavior of the user base changes through time. Although this is currently being done through many formal economic studies of site demand, methods are needed that scale up to higher levels of spatial aggregation. Several areas for research, development and application of improved methods for demand analysis are identified, and improved methods for spatially explicit models of recreation visitation and demand are identified as a priority area for research.

Estimates of national forest recreation use are available at the national, regional, and forest levels via the USDA Forest Service National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program. In some resource planning and management applications, analysts desire recreation use estimates for subforest areas within an individual national forest or for subforest areas that combine portions of several national forests. In this research note we have detailed two approaches whereby the NVUM sampling data may be used to estimate recreation use for a subforest area within a single national forest or for a subforest area combining portions of more than one national forest. The approaches differ in their data requirements, complexity, and assumptions. In the "new forest" approach, recreation use is estimated by using NVUM data obtained only from NVUM interview sites within the area of interest. In the "all-forest information" approach, recreation use is estimated by using sample data gathered on all portions of the national forest(s) that contain the area of interest.