NORC (national outdoor recreation conference)

Many US public land management agencies facilitate opportunities for outdoor recreation, relying on management frameworks and tools intended to foster specific experiential qualities for recreation visitors. But these frameworks and tools assume simplistic relationships between settings and people's experiences, and managers are rarely able to assess their effectiveness.

This presents information gaps about whether managers are supporting the interests and access needs of diverse visitors. This presentation will share findings from a study that explored methods to fill this gap using a data set of nearly 70,000 crowdsourced trip reports from a hiking website to understand the qualities of visitors' trail experiences.

Using analytical methods that rely on machine learning, natural language processing, and regression, we identified seven experiential qualities commonly associated with US wilderness areas and analyzed relationships between the frequency of each experiential quality and the route's administrative, built, biophysical, geographic, and social settings.

Our findings suggest the need to consider more variables in experience-setting relationships, develop more robust models to characterize those relationships, and create new data sources to represent understudied variables. These advances would help empirically inform and improve management frameworks and tools, and promote more responsive management to diverse and evolving social-ecological values.

1. Attendees will understand the information gaps created using traditional recreation management frameworks and monitoring methods.
2. Attendees will gain insight into solutions for creating more responsive and nuanced management frameworks that actively promote access and inclusion on public lands.
3. Attendees will learn about analytic methods that allow for the analysis of large crowdsourced data sets.
4. Attendees will learn about setting characteristics that were associated with four wilderness-related experiential qualities in a national forest in Washington.