National Visitor Use Monitoring Stations in Place in Wallowa-Whitman National Forest
By Joe Hathaway on Thursday, October 5th, 2023 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
BAKER CITY — (Release from Wallowa-Whitman National Forest) Visitors to the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest over the next 12 months may see some college students from West Virginia University at stop stations at high-traffic recreational routes around the Forest.
The students are collecting voluntary survey information from our guests for the National Visitor Use Monitoring Program.
If you see one of their stations on the side of the road, please pull over and help them with their project.
“They will be collecting the data throughout the year,” said Teresa Fraser, Forest Recreation Program Manager for the WWNF. “They will be collecting from October 1, 2023, to Sept 30, 2024. They will then send it all to the Washington office and within six to nine months, all the data collected will be available to the Forest Service and the public on their website.”
The National Visitor Use Monitoring Program has two primary goals. First, to provide the Forest Service and Congress estimates of the volume of recreation visitation to all National Forests and Grasslands. Second, descriptive information about that visitation, including activity participation, demographics, visit duration, measures of satisfaction, and trip spending connected to the visit. Talking to visitors across the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest is vital for the forest to help determine this type of information to assist with future planning.
To gather this information, the Forest Service has partnered with the University of West Virginia and Dr. Robert Burns, Professor and Director of the Division of Forestry and Natural Resources, to offer this outdoor classroom experience with hands-on learning. This fall, several students from West Virginia University traveled to rural northeast Oregon for this internship experience where the students are conducting surveys on the Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests. Each student is provided a list of sites to survey, forest maps, district maps, radios, and guidelines. The sites are broken down into four types: developed day-use sites, overnight-use developed sites, general forest areas, and wilderness areas.
The students are stationed at exit points and high-traffic locations to try and capture the most visitors who volunteer for the survey. The survey results are not used at a site-specific level but rather a large-scale Forest-wide view. These results are used in a variety of ways. The statistical results are sent to Congress. The Forests use the customer satisfaction results to make site improvements. Additionally, the survey results can be helpful information for individuals and organizations with inquiries on various recreational areas and experiences.
How does the survey work? The students are stationed at each site for six hours. The students will stop a forest visitor as they are exiting the area where they are stationed. The students have four different surveys, which focus on the primary purpose of forest visits and secondary activities. At a minimum, the students try to capture the Forest visitor’s home zip code.
At times, getting forest visitors to voluntarily participate in the survey can be challenging, which can make it difficult to collect data. Because of this, the National Visitor Use Monitoring Program also relies on 24-hour traffic counters and a site-specific text service.
Students leave the 24-hour traffic counters on the road after their shift and then later return to pick them up. The counter captures the number of cars that cross over it during that period. The information received from these counters captures the total number of vehicles, not specifically recreational visitors.
In addition, flyers will be posted at certain trailheads with a phone number for recreationists to voluntarily send in recreation information. For areas that have limited cell phone service, visitors are encouraged to save the number and send in their data when convenient.
The job sounds tedious, but the students who participate in the practicum love the experience. Most of these students have never been to northeast Oregon. Many of them are interested in careers in natural resources and use the opportunity to get exposure to the national forests and learn from Forest Service recreation managers.
We hope if you see one of these stations, pull over and help them collect data.
Learn more about the National Visitor Use Monitoring Program: https://www.fs.usda.gov/about-agency/nvum
