Given the diversity of our nations national forests, will only 200 sample days per forest provide useful, reliable information?
A. In most cases, yes it will. If Forests do a good job categorizing their sites into high, medium, and low existing recreation traffic days, this will greatly reduce variance between strata, therefore fewer sampling days per strata are necessary. The pilot study also provided information about variance that is being used in the sample size selection. Q. To be useful for budgeting the recreation use figures must somehow reflect area occupancy. It seems so logical (and necessary) that we should survey/sample within the recreation sites, and not just rely upon catching visitors as they exit. A. Visitors are surveyed in developed sites since it is logical to go where people congregate and spend the majority of their time. However, it would be extremely difficult to try and find visitors while they are recreating in our dispersed areas. We actually tried this in the pilot study and had some limited success. This time the methodology is using something like a big net around the forest perim
