In a bold move, the United States Forest Service (USFS) has radically revised its estimates of National Forest use through the National Visitor Use Monitoring Project. The revisions have been welcomed by Congress and are designed to more factually represent the overall use in America’s forests and recreation areas. This could have huge ramifications for forest visitors and the boating community as the agency calculates real use levels and allocates funds accordingly. In addition the agency is actively seeking volunteers to help with the surveys.You can read the National Visitor Use Monitoring Project at www.fs.fed.us/recreation/recuse/recuse.shtml.
The Oregonian reports in an 11/15/01 article by Michael Milstein, titled “Survey supplants guesswork in estimating forest visitors“, that:
About three-quarters of a billion hikers, sightseers and other visitors have suddenly vanished from national forests, after a new tally proved that earlier counts were vastly inflated and based more on guesswork than fact.
Instead of the nearly 1 billion annual forest visitors reported to Congress and cited until recently by U.S. Forest Service officials, including former Chief Mike Dombeck, the new figures show that about 209 million people actually visit national forests each year.
The sharp revision surprised Forest Service officials who had been touting national forests as the leading federal provider of recreation, claiming that forests annually draw more than three times as many people as live in the United States. They quietly have removed the earlier, higher count from Web sites and publications.