Moist temperate forests west of the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific Northwest (the “westside”) exemplify an emerging challenge: climate change is expanding wildfire-prone conditions into historically wet landscapes, outpacing governance and management approaches developed for areas that have long been considered at low risk for wildfire. Empirical research on management to address wildfire in moist temperate forests—and the factors shaping management decisions—has been limited. This study provides a systematic, cross-ownership assessment of wildfire-oriented forest management in westside forests, drawing on interviews with 61 federal, tribal, state, and private corporate forest owners and managers across five ecoregions in Oregon, Washington, and northern California. Treating logging slash was nearly universal, while prescribed fire, ladder fuels reduction, and strategic fuel breaks were most frequently adopted by federal and tribal owners in the drier Cascades and Klamath ecoregions and largely absent in the wetter Coast Range. This study reveals a gap between current practices and recommendations from fire science that may be explained by structural barriers (regulatory bottlenecks, fiduciary mandates, shareholder demands, and social pressure) and genuine uncertainty among study-area owners and managers about treatment effectiveness. Interviewees described social strategies for wildfire risk reduction as complementing (or substituting) fuels management; such strategies included access restrictions, public education, and cross-boundary coordination. Additionally, interviewees identified policy priorities, including streamlined NEPA and smoke management regulations, financial mechanisms to make fire-resilient management viable for state and private owners, recognition of tribal sovereignty over cultural burning, and more aggressive management on federal lands adjacent to private ownerships.

While there is near unanimous agreement that for tourism to be considered sustainable, residents need to be empowered, few researchers have asked residents which dimensions of empowerment should be prioritized. This research seeks to fill this gap and give residents a voice in sharing their empowerment priorities by conducting an Importance Performance Analysis using the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale within the nature-based tourism destination of Brevard, located in Transylvania County, NC, USA. Results found residents to be generally apathetic towards empowerment, with psychological, social, political, and economic empowerment all falling in the “Low Priority” quadrant when using a scale-centered approach. However, when using a data-centered technique, “Economic Empowerment” and “Political Empowerment” fell into the “Concentrate Here” quadrant. However, “Social Empowerment” landed in the “Possible Overkill” quadrant, and “Psychological Empowerment” landed in the “Keep up the Good Work” quadrant. Results suggest that tourism managers within Brevard should focus on coordinated efforts to improve resident involvement and access to decision-making, and better distribute or highlight the economic benefits tourism brings to the county. If researchers and practitioners really care about empowering residents, more research is needed to identify residents’ empowerment priorities and benchmark how well destinations are performing on those priorities.

Public land management relies on accurate visitor counts in order to understand and mitigate environmental impacts and to quantify the value of ecosystem services provided by natural areas. We build and test predictive visitation models suitable for publicly-managed parks, open space, and other protected lands based on multiple sources of digital mobility data including geotagged posts to social media platforms, community science observations, and a mobile device location dataset from a commercial vendor. Using observational visitation data series from the United States' National Park Service, Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service, we quantify the accuracy of statistical models to predict on-the-ground visitation using individual and combined sources of mobility data alongside other covariates. We find the predictive models performed best in settings where some on-site visitation data can be integrated into the models. On-site visitation data helps to account for meaningful differences in modeled relationships both within and across the three agencies considered. We find variation in the usefulness of the digital mobility data sources, with models combining multiple data sources outperforming those using a single source, including those based solely on mobile device locations. We discuss the practical implications of these findings as well as paths forward to improve visitation estimation on public lands.

While there has been extensive research on resident sentiment towards tourism, few have explored the uniqueness of gateway communities and their relationship to the Protected Areas (PA) surrounding them. This study explores how resident trust of PA managers and support for PAs surrounding their community can spillover to explain additional variance in resident support or opposition to tourism. To test this, traditional antecedents to resident support for tourism, like psychological, social, and political empowerment and the economic benefits from tourism, were modeled independently and in tandem with trust in PA managers and resident support for PAAs. Results from 405 residents of Transylvania County, NC, USA show trust of Pisgah National Forest managers (beta = 0.137, p = 0.001) and resident support for the PA influence their support for tourism (beta = 0.257, p = 0.001) and explain an additional six percentage points in why residents support tourism within their gateway communities when included in the model. These findings suggest that when evaluating gateway communities' support for tourism, it is prudent to also include resident perspectives of PAs and how they are managed as resident perspectives of the PA and its management can spillover to their attitudes towards tourism.

Background The increasing extent and severity of uncharacteristic wildfire has prompted numerous policies and programs promoting landscape-scale fuels reduction. Aims We used novel data sources to measure how recreation was influenced by fuels reduction efforts under the US Forest Service Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) Program. Methods We used posts to four social media platforms to estimate the number of social media user-days within CFLR landscapes and asked: (1) did visitation within CFLR Program landscapes between 2012 and 2020 change in a manner consistent with the pattern on nearby lands, and (2) was there a relationship between the magnitudes of specific fuel treatment activities within CFLR landscapes and visitation to that landscape? Key results In aggregate, visitation to the CFLR landscapes changed at a rate mirroring the trend observed elsewhere. Within CFLR landscapes, pre-commercial thinning and pruning had slight positive influences on visitation whereas prescribed burning and managed wildfire had slight negative influences. Conclusions Fuel treatments can have a modest influence on visitation, but we didnot find any wholesale changes in visitation within CFLR landscapes. Implications Social media and other novel data sources offer an opportunity to fill in gaps in empirical data on recreation to better understand social-ecological system linkages.

Public lands are an important source of outdoor recreation opportunities. These opportunities provide a variety of public benefits, including promoting physical and mental well-being, contributing to local economies, and raising conservation awareness. In response to current and potential demand, it is ever more important to meet and anticipate infrastructure and user needs. With aging infrastructure (e.g., trails, access points, parking lots), managers face the need to maintain existing, and establish new, recreation opportunities to meet user expectations and contribute to positive perceptions of recreation offerings within the realities of budgetary challenges. Compounding this difficulty is the frequent presence of hierarchical decision-making process within public agencies providing recreation opportunities. For example, within the U.S. Forest Service National Forest System (NFS), recreation investment decisions, such as those under the Great American Outdoors Act, are often made at the regional administrative level after considering the needs and conditions across multiple NFS units within the region. While certain aspects of infrastructure can be measured for quality (i.e., physical attributes like trail conditions), it is difficult to quantify psychological elements of user satisfaction. Recreationist satisfaction is important to promoting supportive and engaged users of public lands. Therefore, a priority for management is understanding how user experiences compare to expectations. Direct ratings from surveys can be useful proxies of user perceptions. For decades, Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) has translated importance and satisfaction ratings to action plans, a valuable management tool in valid application. However, IPA treats each unit as an “island,” and doesn’t fully address the challenge of comparing conditions and needs across units. A variation of IPA, known as Importance Performance Competitor Analysis (IPCA), compares a focal unit against a competitor. Using the National Visitor Use Monitoring Program (NVUM) satisfaction survey module, we adapted IPCA to the NFS regional organizations. Rather than analyzing unit versus competitor, we assessed each unit against its complementary regional aggregate over several points in time. A classification-based percentage identified the highest priorities regionally, selecting attributes for follow-up with IPA to identify relevant units for management. For two NFS regions, we present examples of translating survey output to reports meaningful for management, either as a snapshot in time or across multiple time points. These methodologies are adaptable to other unit networks under the same managerial oversight, with Likert scale data collected on multiple time periods. The primary objective is to translate survey data to recommended actions over a hierarchical network, which can guide managers in prioritizing needs and sustainable planning. In our examples, we identified region-level priorities (i.e., attributes) by site type, followed by use of a longstanding methodology (IPA) for site-level identification potentially useful to managers.

Natural disturbances such as wildfires are increasing in severity and frequency. Although the ecological impacts of disturbance are well documented, we have limited understanding of how disturbances and associated management responses influence recreation use patterns. This reflects, in part, difficulty in quantifying recreation use across different land ownerships with inconsistent, or non-existent, recreation monitoring practices. In this study, we use visitation models based on social media to examine how recreation use changed after a wildfire and site closures in a large, mixed-ownership landscape. We find that wildfire and associated closures resulted in visitation loss to the recreation system as a whole and little site-to-site displacement within the system in the two years following the wildfire. Our study highlights the importance, when considering how wildfire and management may alter recreation use patterns, of considering the many factors that influence substitution behavior, including the relative locations of visitor origins, disturbances, and substitute sites.

While there have been a host of studies investigating the COVID-19 pandemic's influence on outdoor recreation, few have investigated the socio-demographic composition and motivations of visitors who increased their outdoor recreation during this period and if these users will continue recreating at the same level as the pandemic wanes. This study surveyed visitors to the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests (NPNF) within the US state of North Carolina to identify if rising outdoor recreation participation is solely a result of the pandemic or more indicative of a renaissance. Demographic and motivational differences between those whose recreation decreased, stayed the same or increased during the pandemic were also analyzed to see if these patterns remain stable one year after the pandemic. The sample of 1594 visitors from Georgia (n = 483), South Carolina (n = 682), and North Carolina (n = 429) indicate growth in visitation to the NPNF is not just a fad but more of a renaissance with continued high levels of visitation forecasted after the pandemic. Results also show that outdoor recreationists characterized as more ethnically diverse with lower income and educational levels had visitation levels to the forest that increased during the pandemic compared to the outdoor recreationists who were White, more affluent, and highly educated. However, these changes appear to reverse moving out of the pandemic as these more diverse users mention having greater structural, interpersonal, and intrapersonal constraints. Managers who seek social and environmental justice with the provisioning of outdoor recreation should follow-up with these more diverse users to better understand their satisfaction with the FS experience during the pandemic and identify strategies to help them negotiate constraints limiting their outdoor recreation. Management implications: For public land managers, these findings suggest that increased visitation levels are here to stay. The results also suggest that the pandemic provided users with more diverse backgrounds the space and time to recreate during the pandemic. Unfortunately, it appears that the challenges of everyday life may limit this group from continuing to recreate at the level they did during the pandemic. Managers should take advantage of this opportunity to try to understand these more diverse users and why they anticipate their participation in outdoor recreation dropping as we move out of the pandemic.

Public land managers depend on reliable and readily available data about outdoor recreation in parks and greenspaces. However, traditional recreation monitoring techniques including visitor surveying and counting cannot be implemented over large spatial and temporal scales, especially in remote and undeveloped settings where monitoring is costly. To fill these data gaps, and thereby inform decision-making, this study develops and tests the efficacy of a novel recreation monitoring technique that engages visitors in data collection using a chatbot and text-messages. Drawing on knowledge and methods from community science and crowdsourcing, we present a relatively low-cost and low-barrier approach to counting and characterizing recreational visits on public lands. In an 18-month pilot implementation on a national forest in Washington, USA, we found that crowdsourced data collected using the chatbot were consistent with results of controlled counts and in-person surveys. Furthermore, some sites received relatively high participation rates, up to 12% of recreating parties, regardless of cellular connectivity at the site. This study, which is the first to engage public land usersin community science using a text-messaging chatbot for the purposes of studying outdoor recreation, demonstrates the potential for technology to support new community science approaches that involve visitors in land stewardship and the development of recreation monitoring systems.

After a century of intensive logging, federal forest management policies were developed in the 1990s to protect remaining large trees and old forests in the western US. Today, due to rapidly changing ecological conditions, new threats and uncertainties, and scientific advancements, some policy provisions are being re‐evaluated in interior Oregon and Washington. The case for re‐evaluation is clearest where small‐ to large‐sized, immature, fast‐growing, fire‐intolerant trees have filled in forests after both a long period of fire exclusion and the harvest of large, old trees. This infilling has created abundant fuel ladders that increase patch and landscape vulnerability to severe wildfires, which now threaten many forests. As climate change continues to alter fire regimes, we recommend that landscape‐level planning is needed to determine where fire‐tolerant and intolerant forest successional conditions are best retained on the landscape. Critical to our proposal are effective public engagement, collaboration, and tribal consultation.

Staff on the Entiat Ranger District of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington state partnered with researchers to develop a strategy to improve the sustainability of the district’s recreation program. The need to pursue a sustainable recreation strategy came about in response to a series of severe wildfires that damaged recreation infrastructure and altered natural resource conditions. Concurrent to those wildfires was continued limited funding for infrastructure maintenance and recreation management. Researchers worked with Entiat Ranger District staff to develop and implement social and biophysical assessments of recreation interests and recreation resource conditions. The assessments informed a sustainable recreation strategy document that included site-specific and districtwide recommendations. This work was guided by national and regional U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service frameworks for sustainable recreation planning, and we incorporated the concept of resilience. This report describes the development of a sustainable recreation strategy for the Entiat Ranger District, which can serve as an example for other units in developing a sustainable recreation plan at a local level.

Hessburg, Paul F.; Charnley, Susan; Wendel, Kendra L.; White, Eric M.; Singleton, Peter H.; Peterson, David W.; Halofsky, Jessica E.; Gray, Andrew N.; Spies, Thomas A.; Flitcroft, Rebecca L.; White, Rachel. 2020. The 1994 Eastside Screens large-tree harvest limit: review of science relevant to forest planning 25 years later. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-990. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 114 p. In 1994, a large-tree harvest standard known as the “21-inch rule” was applied to land and resource management plans of national forests in eastern Oregon and Washington (hereafter, the “east side”) to halt the loss of large, old, live, and dead trees and old forest patches. These trees and forest patches have distinct ecological, economic, and social values, as reflected in widespread fish and wildlife use, public support for protecting them, and commercial interest in harvesting them, thus they have been the topic of much discussion and debate. At the request of regional Forest Service managers, we review the scientific knowledge accrued since implementation of the 21-inch rule and discuss the rule’s role and relevance to forest planning today. Critical to our review are new findings from the social sciences and their integration with new biophysical and ecological science to form a more holistic understanding of forest ecosystems and the values they provide. We examine how human values associated with old trees and old forests are nuanced and evolving and discuss important social and economic changes relevant to large, old trees and old forests that have occurred across the Pacific Northwest in the past three decades. Major advances also have been realized in landscape and fire ecology, climate and carbon science, and wildlife, fishery, and silviculture sciences related to the role and importance of large and old trees in east-side forests. Key findings show that trees of early-seral species that are older than 150 years contribute important ecological values not present in younger large trees. Other findings come from climate change research, landscape assessments, and fire history studies, which have contributed knowledge about the historical and likely future variability in fire frequency and severity in various forest types, landscape dynamics, and how landscape resilience works. Many forests are now homogenized, with conditions no longer resembling those that existed prior to Euro-American settlement. Disturbance regimes have become more severe in many places, causing widespread ripple effects. The area burned by wildfire will continue to increase under climate change, and disturbance regimes will change further, leading to even broader changes in forest structure and species composition. Moderate or severe fires or fuel treatments, coupled with maintenance burning, may be needed to remove local seed sources and competition from undesirable shade-tolerant trees and help some patches of forest better adapt to fire and climate change. Proactive management can help facilitate some transitions, leading to better outcomes for people, forests, and native species.

There is significant policy and research interest in (a) ecosystem services as a framework for understanding the benefits humans receive from natural systems and (b) subjective well-being as a lens for understanding the effects of public policy decisions. The present study occurred at the intersection of these two fields. Choice experiment and contingent subjective well-being (SWB) models were estimated to understand the potential effects of coastal marine and forest reserves in Oregon, USA. Both models indicated heterogeneity in effects across groups defined by environmental worldview and, for marine reserves, recreation use of reserve areas and employment in the commercial fisheries sector. Methodologically, results suggested that a similar process underlays responses to both types of survey task, with similar model coefficient patterns and frequent consistency in responses. However, differences also were indicated, and differences may be more pronounced in other studies, such as those involving between-subject designs. Contingent SWB is a potentially important measurement approach, but further evaluation is needed, including with respect to the effects of task complexity and evaluation object salience.

There is limited research on recreationists' responses to changes in resource conditions after wildfire. Existing studies often rely on presenting visitors with hypothetical wildfire scenarios or simulated changes in conditions. We completed a quick assessment of recreation visitation and visitor experience in the months immediately following an actual high-severity wildfire within a popular river canyon in Oregon, USA. We also explored the influence of wildfire on the recreation plans of campers. We found that recreation use dropped sharply in the immediate aftermath of the wildfire, but rebounded to long-term averages within months. In addition, visitors reported the burned landscape had little influence on their recreation experience. Forty-five percent of campers reported having changed a planned camping trip within the prior two years because of smoke or wildfire. Nearly half of respondents reported that potential for wildfire would be a factor in where they planned to camp in the future. Management implications: Our findings are consistent with other studies in showing that visitation losses do happen after wildfire but are short-lived and may differ between day and overnight users.. Although visitors were often saddened to see the burned landscape, their recreation experiences and satisfaction appeared largely unchanged.. Distributing up-to-date information about conditions at recreation destinations may be useful for potential visitors concerned about smoke and wildfire.. Recreationists substitute between recreation destinations or seasons to avid wildfire or smoke. Managers may do well to prepare for receiving visitors displaced by wildfire or smoke and having more visitors outside primary recreation seasons

Outdoor and nature-based recreation provides countless social benefits, yet public land managers often lack information on the spatial and temporal extent of recreation activities. Social media is a promising source of data to fill information gaps because the amount of recreational use is positively correlated with social media activity. However, despite the implication that these correlations could be employed to accurately estimate visitation, there are no known transferable models parameterized for use with multiple social media data sources. This study tackles these issues by examining the relative value of multiple sources of social media in models that estimate visitation at unmonitored sites and times across multiple destinations. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 social media posts and 286,000 observed visits from two regions in the United States, we compare multiple competing statistical models for estimating visitation. We find social media data substantially improve visitor estimates at unmonitored sites, even when a model is parameterized with data from another region. Visitation estimates are further improved when models are parameterized with on-site counts. These findings indicate that while social media do not fully substitute for on-site data, they are a powerful component of recreation research and visitor management.

In 1994, a large-tree harvest standard known as the “21-inch rule” was applied to land and resource management plans of national forests in eastern Oregon and Washington (hereafter, the “east side”) to halt the loss of large, old, live, and dead trees and old forest patches. These trees and forest patches have distinct ecological, economic, and social values, as reflected in widespread fish and wildlife use, public support for protecting them, and commercial interest in harvesting them, thus they have been the topic of much discussion and debate. At the request of regional Forest Service managers, we review the scientific knowledge accrued since implementation of the 21-inch rule and discuss the rule’s role and relevance to forest planning today. Critical to our review are new findings from the social sciences and their integration with new biophysical and ecological science to form a more holistic understanding of forest ecosystems and the values they provide. We examine how human values associated with old trees and old forests are nuanced and evolving and discuss important social and economic changes relevant to large, old trees and old forests that have occurred across the Pacific Northwest in the past three decades. Major advances also have been realized in landscape and fire ecology, climate and carbon science, and wildlife, fishery, and silviculture sciences related to the role and importance of large and old trees in east-side forests. Key findings show that trees of early-seral species that are older than 150 years contribute important ecological values not present in younger large trees. Other findings come from climate change research, landscape assessments, and fire history studies, which have contributed knowledge about the historical and likely future variability in fire frequency and severity in various forest types, landscape dynamics, and how landscape resilience works. Many forests are now homogenized, with conditions no longer resembling those that existed prior to Euro-American settlement. Disturbance regimes have become more severe in many places, causing widespread ripple effects. The area burned by wildfire will continue to increase under climate change, and disturbance regimes will change further, leading to even broader changes in forest structure and species composition. Moderate or severe fires or fuel treatments, coupled with maintenance burning, may be needed to remove local seed sources and competition from undesirable shade-tolerant trees and help some patches of forest better adapt to fire and climate change. Proactive management can help facilitate some transitions, leading to better outcomes for people, forests, and native species.

The National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program data underlies estimates of the volume of recreation use of the National Forest System. The data also enable estimation of both the local economic contributions and nonmarket benefits of that visitation. Applications include evaluating the effects of natural disasters, site characteristics, and climate change, as well as expenditure and benefit transfers. This article describes the history and science background of the NVUM program, outlines the methods used in estimating market and nonmarket economic outcomes, and lists some examples of results found in the literature.

Scientific knowledge and tools have central roles in contemporary federal forest programs that promote restoration in large landscapes and across ownerships. Although we know much about the role of science in decisionmaking and ways that science can be better linked to practice, we know less about manager perspectives about science and science tools, and the perceived role of both in planning. We surveyed Forest Service resource managers in the western United States to address this knowledge gap. Respondents engaged most frequently with science via reading research publications; direct engagement with scientists was less common. There was widespread agreement that science was a useful input to decisionmaking. Managers believed more weight should be placed on science in decisionmaking in cases of low public consensus than in cases of high public consensus. Managers with the most frequent engagement with science generally held more positive views towards science and its role in decisionmaking.