An outdoor recreation use model with applications to evaluating survey estimators

Abstract

An outdoor recreation use simulator (ORUS) has been developed to simulate recreation survey data currently being obtained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program’s survey of the national forests of the United States. Statistical distributions represent the various behaviors of recreationists during their visit to a recreation site. The beta distribution is used to model arriving times and last-exiting times. The Poisson distribution is used to model the number of intermediate exits from the site, and the times of the exits are selected randomly according to the uniform distribution. Finally, three levels of trap shyness are assigned to the recreationists to quantify the probability that the recreationists will be captured by the interviewer. The beta distributions for arriving and last-exiting are parameterized to the NVUM survey data. The functioning of the simulator is demonstrated with a simple example. The utility of ORUS in evaluating the bias and coefficient of variation of various survey scenario estimators of recreation use is also presented.

Keywords

Last-exiting recreationist, national visitor use monitoring, ORUS, simulation, trap shy

Citation

Zarnoch, Stanley J.; English, Donald B.K.; Kocis, Susan M. 2005. An outdoor recreation use model with applications to evaluating survey estimators. Res. Pap. SRS-37 Asheville, NC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Souther Research Station 15p