Summary

An outdoor recreation use simulator (ORUS) has been developed to simulate
recreation survey data currently being obtained by the U.S. Department
of Agriculture Forest Service, National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM)
program’s survey of the national forests of the United States. Statistical
distributions represent the various behaviors of recreationists during their
visit to a recreation site. The beta distribution is used to model arriving
times and last-exiting times. The Poisson distribution is used to model the
number of intermediate exits from the site, and the times of the exits are
selected randomly according to the uniform distribution. Finally, three
levels of trap shyness are assigned to the recreationists to quantify the probability
that the recreationists will be captured by the interviewer. The beta
distributions for arriving and last-exiting are parameterized to the NVUM
survey data. The functioning of the simulator is demonstrated with a simple
example. The utility of ORUS in evaluating the bias and coefficient of
variation of various survey scenario estimators of recreation use is also
presented.

This was authored by Stanley J. Zarnoch, Donald B. K. English, and Susan M. Kocis for the Forest Service as Research Paper SRS-37.