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A model for evaluating dispersed outdoor recreation use estimation

Informally Refereed

Abstract

An outdoor recreation use simulator (ORUS) has been developed to simulate dispersed recreation survey data similar to that collected by the National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) Project's survey of the national forests of the U.S.A. Statistical distributions are used to represent the various behaviors of recreationists during their visit to a dispersed area. The beta distribution is used to model PI arriving times and last exiting times. The number of intermediate exits from a site is determined by the 8 Poisson distribution while their times are selected randomly according to the uniform distribution. Finally, three trap shy behaviors are assigned to the recreationists to quantify their probability of capture by the interviewer. The arriving and last exiting beta distributions are fitted to the NVUM data. The functioning of the simulator is demonstrated with a simple example with explanations of each recreationist's actions with respect to the sampling methodology. The utility of ORUS in evaluating the biấs and coefficient of variability of various estimating scenarios is also presented.

Citation

Zarnoch, Stanley J.; English, Donald B. K.; Kocis, Susan M. 2004. A model for evaluating dispersed outdoor recreation use estimation. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Monitoring and Management of Visitor Flows in Recreational and Protected Areas, June 16-20, Rovaniemi, Finland, eds. Sievanen, Tuija; Erkkonen, Joel; Jokimaki, Jukka; Saarinen, Jarkko, Tuulentie, Seija; Virtanen, Eija
https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/20231