Section 1 About

1.1 Abstract

Outdoor recreation and access to nature have well-documented positive impacts on mental and physical well-being. Federal public land management agencies in the United States offer a variety of outdoor recreation activities to visitors. However, people from different socioeconomic and identity groups access federal public lands unequally due to historical discrimination and current inequities. This project uses data from the Recreation Information Database (RIDB) and the United States Census Bureau (US Census) to explore patterns of visitor use of reservable overnight sites (such as campgrounds, cabins, hike-in, and more). Specifically, we used 2018 reservation data and US Census data from the next available year to 2018 (i.e. 2018 median income data, 2015 language data). We created the interactive Outdoor Equity App that gives users tools to summarize data, explore relationships between RIDB and US Census variables, view maps of where visitors are coming from for reservable sites in California, and download subset data. This technical documentation includes information on metadata, application maintenance, and next steps for expanding the app to include visitor data from more locations and time periods.

1.2 About the Authors

This technical documentation for the Outdoor Equity App was created by Clarissa Boyajian and Halina Do-Linh. The app was created as the final capstone project for their Master of Environmental Data Science degrees from the University of California’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. Both women are passionate about environmental justice, open science, the art of data visualizations, and spending time recreating outdoors. Please reach out to either of both of us with any questions.

This project could not have been completed without the support and guidance of the Bren School advisors Dr. Frank Davis and Dr. Allison Horst and our external advisors Dr. Kaitlyn Gaynor and Dr. Will Rice.

References

Chang, Winston, Joe Cheng, JJ Allaire, Carson Sievert, Barret Schloerke, Yihui Xie, Jeff Allen, Jonathan McPherson, Alan Dipert, and Barbara Borges. 2021. Shiny: Web Application Framework for r. https://shiny.rstudio.com/.