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INTRODUCTION The U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service’s National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program provides managers with valuable information about the people they serve. By knowing how many people recreate on the forest, what activities they do, how long they stay, how much they spend, and how satisfied they are with the facilities and services provided, managers can make more informed strategic decisions. Managers also use information provided by the NVUM program in forest management plans, Congressional reporting, resource monitoring, and strategic planning analyses. This program uses bestavailable science methods in its data collection, analysis, and reporting. In addition to serving the needs of USDA Forest Service managers, NVUM results and data are used by external customers, including States, private industry, and academia.

DEFINITIONS The NVUM program reports visitation estimates using standard definitions of national forest visits and national forest site visits that provide comparable estimates of use. A national forest site visit is the entry of one person upon a national forest site or area to participate in recreation activities for an unspecified period of time. A national forest visit is the entry of one person upon a national forest to participate in recreation activities for an unspecified period of time. A national forest visit is composed of one or more national forest site visits. For a multiple-day visit to count as one national forest visit, time spent on the forest must be continuous. For example, one national forest visit could include hiking on one day, spending the night in a USDA Forest Service campground, and then going fishing on the second day. However, if the individual spent the night in a hotel in the local community, the two days of activity (hiking one day and fishing the next) would count as two national forest visits. A viewing corridor visit is the entry of one person onto a travelway (such as a road, trail, railroad, or river) that is neither owned nor managed by the USDA Forest Service, for the purpose of viewing scenery on National Forest System lands that are adjacent to the travelway. These viewing corridor visits do not include any direct recreational use of National Forest System lands.

VISITOR DEMOGRAPHICS The NVUM program obtained descriptive information about national forest visitors. This information includes the person’s age, race, activity participation, expenditures, length of stay, and satisfaction with USDA Forest Service recreation facilities and services.

The NVUM methodology also measured the percent of national forest site visits that occurred at each of four types of sites: developed day-use sites, developed overnight sites, general undeveloped forest areas, and designated wilderness. In addition, visitors were categorized as either locals or nonlocals. Those that lived within 50 miles of the site at which they were interviewed were categorized as locals; those that lived over 50 miles away were categorized as nonlocals.

VISITOR SPENDING The money people spend while visiting NFS lands contributes to the economy of local communities. Several factors determine how much is typically spent in connection with a visit to the forest. The first is if the forest visit is the primary trip destination for the whole trip away from home, or whether the forest visit is a side trip (non-primary trip), while visiting some other place. Spending amounts are also related to whether or not the person is a local resident and whether or not the visit includes an overnight stay in the area. For multiple-day visits, whether the person used lodging facilities on or off the NFS lands affects how much is spent.

CONCLUSION NFS lands support nearly 205 million recreation visits each year. These recreation visitors spend over 7.5 billion dollars in communities near the NFS land. In addition, there are about 175 million occasions of people viewing the forest landscape from travel corridors within the forests. Recreation on NFS lands provides a significant contribution to the physical and mental health and well-being of the American public, as well as significant economic contribution to many communities located near NFS lands. Balancing the variety of recreation demands is an important and challenging task for forest managers. The comprehensive and reliable data provided through the NVUM program helps managers to better understand the customers they serve, to identify the national forest recreation market niche, and to target limited resources where they will best serve both forest visitors and the American public as a whole. NVUM results have challenged some common perceptions about recreation visitation patterns. On many NFS lands the bulk of the recreation budget is used to maintain overnight and developed facilities, yet nationally only 8 percent of visits include spending the night on NFS lands in developed campgrounds. Only about one-third of national forest site visits occur on developed day or overnight facilities, and nearly half of these are visits to ski areas. The majority of visitation is actually day use. Day users tend to come to the same forest many times each year and stay for short periods of time. Sixty-two percent of all national forest site visits occur in undeveloped areas of the forest and grasslands (4 percent in designated Wilderness and 58 percent in undeveloped non-Wilderness areas). Undeveloped, unconfined (unmanaged) recreation is one of the Chief’s identified threats. Monitoring and managing the effects of recreation visitors in these undeveloped areas, where a large number of people come for short duration visits, is time consuming and labor intensive for the agency because visitors are not concentrated in a few specific areas.

For more information: Separate reports for each national forest and grassland are available at http://www.fs.fed.us/recreation/ programs/nvum. The full NVUM dataset is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2005, through the USDA Forest Service’s Natural Resource Information System (NRIS) Human Dimensions module.