Section 4 Specific Objectives

Federal lands in the United States provide important recreation opportunities to the public, but there is a growing need to understand and mitigate inequities in access to outdoor recreation. This project addressed this need by creating the Outdoor Equity App, an interactive platform for summarizing and visualizing site-specific patterns and trends in visitation volume, demand, and visitors’ location of origin. The platform integrates nationwide Recreation.gov reservation data with US census data to:

• Gain insights into demand for reservations across different types of recreation areas.
• Analyze access to federal public lands among historically underserved groups in relation to recreation site type, cost, location, and demand.
• Clearly define all variables and values in the metadata documentation.
• Allow users to download a subset of the combined data for further analysis.