Estimating Future Recreational Demand

The purpose of this book is to help practitioners assess recreation demand in their routine administration and planning processes and to help decision makers make better and more defensible decisions. The estimation of recreation demand is a decision based upon sound professional judgment and due consideration of many information sources and factors. The field of decision science has determined that humans need analytical structure and tools to best deal with complex decisions. Thus, this book is a question-based tool to help practitioners assemble and analyze important available information. Recreation demand is the estimated number of people who are projected to participate in a particular recreation opportunity at some predetermined future time and location. The target audiences for this book include recreation planners, resource managers, park superintendents, refuge managers, river and trail managers, landscape architects, facility and site designers, interpretive planners, economists, budget and policy analysts, community planners and recreation business operators. The issue of recreation demand is not a unique or occasional question facing one agency. Rather, it is an ongoing question challenging all local, State, Federal and private recreation providers. This book encourages an interagency and collaborative perspective to gather and analyze existing information.