Visits to national parks are on the rise. In 2024, the National Park Service set a new record of 332 million recreation visits, with over 6 million more visitors than the previous year. While these numbers indicate growing interest in outdoor recreation, climbing visitation rates present challenges for land managers working to prevent environmental damage and overcrowding. Now, perhaps more than ever, there is a tremendous need to accurately measure and predict visitation to federal lands and waters. These estimates ultimately inform resource management and policy decisions that impact the experience of national park visitors across the country.
A few months ago, the United States government approved bipartisan legislation to improve outdoor recreation and signed the EXPLORE Act into law. This multifaceted legislation includes measures to make public lands more accessible, support gateway communities surrounding public lands whose economies rely on recreation spending, and to improve data on outdoor recreation. The U.S. Department of the Interior partnered with expert researchers at the University of Washington’s Outdoor Recreation and Data Lab and the eScience Institute to inform its approach to improving outdoor recreation data as required by the law.
The Outdoor R&D Lab is home to leading experts in outdoor reaction research and data-driven methods. Lab members Dieta Hanson, the lead author on the report, and Spencer Wood collaborated with federal co-authors from the US Geological Survey Fort Collins Science Center and US Department of the Interior Office of Policy Analysis to document and review best practices for visitor estimation on federally managed lands and waters.
In the report, the authors provide an overview of existing visitor estimation practices across federal agencies, including the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and others, and provide best practices for approaches utilizing emergent technologies. They suggest that agencies collaborate with one another to establish consistency across visitation metrics, which are currently variable between agencies. In accordance with the requirements of the EXPLORE Act, they also recommend the development of a sole, public data repository for estimates created by all agencies.
The researchers consider the advantages of different approaches to estimating visitation in relation to the characteristics of the location. For example, recreational sites with high staffing levels and controlled access points would find it most cost-effective to rely on automated vehicle counters and similar sensing technologies. In other locations, where visitors are dispersed across large areas and difficult to directly observe, public land managers could consider estimation methods that incorporate more cutting-edge data. Other research coming out of the Outdoor R&D Lab led to approaches and best practices for estimating visitation using locations of mobile devices and community scientists. Improving cellular connectivity on Federal recreation lands and waters, which is also an aspect of the EXPLORE Act, would bolster this approach to collecting visitation data.
Overall, the report was concentrated on visitation numbers and activity participation while a future companion report will focus on other aspects of the visitor experience on federal lands and waters. The authors plan to collaborate on further research with other experts to better understand how agencies measure visitor satisfaction, behavior, spending, and other related factors. When put together, this compilation of key information and approaches is crucial for policy guiding our parks and public lands. This knowledge can also better prepare and inform gateway communities surrounding federal lands whose local economies are frequently tied to outdoor recreation.
In and beyond national parks, the Outdoor R&D Lab continues to drive and refine data-intensive research in outdoor recreation. Their research using large datasets and computational models connects the needs of land managers to the experiences of outdoor enthusiasts. When asked about the core purpose of their work, Hanson said “This report and our research help land managers accurately measure how many people are using our public lands. These data are crucial for managing current use and planning for future opportunities in outdoor recreation.”