What is the purpose of the National Recreation Use Monitoring project? Does our Forest have to participate?
A. The purpose of the NRUM project is to provide statistically valid, reliable recreation use numbers to Congress, the Forest Service Washington Office, the Regional Offices and each Forest. Every forest will participate between FY2000 and FY2003. Within these four years each forest was assigned a specific year to sample and is given a hard target in Inventory and Monitoring called survey days. Since this is a hard target participation is mandatory. The forest will benefit from participating in the project. They will receive statistically reliable recreation use numbers that can be used for planning at the forest level. A forest wide estimate of national forest visits and site visits will be produced along with descriptor data relating to visitor satisfaction and economic expenditures. Site specific recreation use numbers will not be produced. Additional information about the project can be obtained from this web site by pulling the Methodology paper.
