In Fall of 2022, Otak opened its doors to our brand-new Denver office. We reinforced our presence in downtown Denver for several strategic purposes – including a motivation to deepen our commitments to and strengthen our relationships within the greater Denver metropolitan area.
And what better way to build relationships than to host an Open House! On October 5th Otak welcomed our valued clients, teaming partners, and local community members to Otak’s downtown space in the historic Elephant Corral building.
A Variety of Practices Forging New Relationships
At the event, we had the chance for meaningful discussion with local peers in architecture, landscape architecture, planning, water resources, and transportation. With a variety of clients in attendance, it was a fantastic opportunity to get better acquainted with partners and local organizations – some of whom we’ve already partnered with on projects, and others we hopefully will in the future.
Beyond Networking
The energy in the office was uplifting as the Denver community came together to explore the space, enjoy food and drinks, engage in meaningful conversation, and foster connections. The event’s success wasn’t just measured in terms of professional connections, but in the opportunity to engage and recharge together outside of a video call. We were honored to host this event and start dialogue with the potential clients, partners, and friends in attendance.
As we continue to thrive and grow our work in the Rocky Mountain region, Otak remains dedicated to contributing to the communities we serve. We look forward to even more vibrant and interactive events in the future, recognizing that it’s not just about planning and building infrastructure, but also about building bridges between people in our communities for years to come.
In the realm of preserving our natural treasures and offering exceptional recreational experiences, the practice of Visitor Use Management (VUM) has taken center stage. This practice, critical in balancing the conservation of our public lands with the enhancement of visitor’s experiences, has gained momentum as increasing visitation to these landscapes becomes the new norm.
To address this growing challenge,the Society of Outdoor Recreation Professionals (SORP) recently hosted a workshop focused on Visitor Use Management. SORP has a forty-year history of fostering collaboration among outdoor recreation professionals through similar events that attract state, federal, and local land managers, as well as university researchers, and professional consultants. Among the topics this year, was the growing application of Visitor Use Management.
From left to right, Erin Hanczyk (NYSDEC), Abbie Larkin (Otak), Sara Hart (NYSDEC), and Steve Lawson (Otak) respond to questions following their presentation on the active NYSDEC VUM Project
What is the Society of Outdoor Recreation Professionals?
The Society of Outdoor Recreation Professionals, or SORP, serves as a vital hub for individuals passionate about safeguarding parks and protected areas while promoting sustainable outdoor recreation. With a vision to create sustainable outdoor recreation opportunities for all, a mission to advance the outdoor recreation profession through leadership, and a commitment to values centered on integrity and inclusivity, SORP plays a crucial role in shaping the future of outdoor experiences.
This year, SORP hosted a workshop at Acadia National Park centered on Visitor Use Management, drawing over 140 virtual and in-person participants from across the United States and Canada. Attendees delved into case studies, engaged in discussions about challenges and opportunities in implementing VUM, and explored avenues for mutual support and knowledge-sharing among a community of practice. The event provided a unique platform for practitioners to exchange ideas and best practices, advancing the field of Visitor Use Management.
A Case Study on Implementing Visitor Use Management in New York State
A process map developed for the NYSDEC VUM project, depicting project milestones along a timeline
Among the notable speakers at the event were Otak’s Steve Lawson and Abbie Larkin, key members of our Visitor Use Planning and Management (VUPM) team. Together, with representatives from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC), they co-presented an Otak case study detailing their work in the Adirondack and Catskill Parks.
The presentation outlined Otak’s approach to implement the Visitor Use Management Framework in key areas of the parks experiencing increasing visitor use pressure. The case study emphasized the need for a proactive and structured approach to address the challenges stemming from rising visitation numbers, changing visitor expectations, and the imperative to prioritize resource protection and promote sustainable recreation.
The shared information sheds light on the transition from a reactive and disjointed approach to a systematic, data-driven, and holistic process for sustainable visitor use management. Key components of the approach include internal planning workshops, public outreach, and stakeholder engagement opportunities that reflect the Visitor Use Management Framework.
By collecting data on visitor use levels along roadways, in parking areas, on trails, and at key destinations, and data on visitor use patterns, experiences, and perceptions, this project will assess current conditions related to visitors’ experiences and public safety. The project also provides the basis for evaluating the relationship between recreation use and impacts, and ultimately the development of adaptable, long-term visitor use management strategies.
The Takeaway: Building Familiarity with the Visitor Use Management Process
Visitor Use Management is a thriving field with immense potential to shape the future of outdoor recreation. We’re excited to partner with organizations like SORP that share a commitment to growing the field and promoting the use of the Visitor Use Management framework. These events provide unique opportunities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing with the growing community of practice while creating the space for new ideas and connections to form.
The event also proved to be valuable for organizations learning about the RFP process by the State of New York, offering a glimpse into the practicalities of initiating Visitor Use Management projects while also being introduced to our team as well as other professional consultants. As leaders in this field, Otak will continue to share ideas and address visitor use challenges at sites across the country and beyond, to ensure a sustainable and enjoyable outdoor experience for all.
Intensive visitor use pressure has impacted the quality of visitors’ experiences, generated public safety concerns, and resulted in resource degradation in some of New York State’s most prominent recreation destinations. A previous study conducted in the High Peaks region established baseline information on visitor use conditions in the area. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) aimed to address these issues in key areas of the Adirondack and Catskill Parks with support to develop and implement strategies for sustainable visitor use.
Applying a Formal Approach to Sustainable Visitor Use in New York State
The Adirondack and Catskill Parks are treasured state resources and important, world-class landscapes for visitors from the region, across the country, and internationally. With a mandate to protect and preserve natural resources and provide for human enjoyment, the NYSDEC is required to assess the physical, biological, and social carrying capacity of key park areas impacted by increasing visitor use pressure. Focused on the Central High Peaks region of the Adirondack Park and the Kaaterskill Clove region of the Catskill Park, the planning process leverages the Visitor Use Management Framework to help understand visitor capacities, identify visitor use management strategies, and set long-term monitoring plans to meet desired conditions for visitors’ experiences and public safety. The work represents a significant opportunity to implement the Visitor Use Management Framework as a systematic, transparent, inclusive, and legally defensible planning process that promotes sustainable recreation on these public lands.
In November 1805, the Lewis and Clark Expedition reached a site along the lower Columbia River they named Station Camp. Located in current-day Washington state, the riverfront site was redesigned to become a National Park Unit of the broader Lewis and Clark National Historical Park.
A Historic Site with Tribal Heritage Designed to Benefit the Public
While the site carries significance to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, that event represents only a small part of its history as a long-time summer village of the Chinook Nation. Once an important trading site for tribes on the Columbia over the course of centuries, Middle Village / Station Camp Park is now designed to serve as an outdoor commemorative park and interpretive landscape with elements that tell the important story of the location. After an unintended archeological discovery at the site, revised plans moved forward in meeting the broader vision of promoting the region’s rich history. The updated park master plan and final design plans for the site also address parking and pedestrian circulation, as well as low impact measures for stormwater facilities, earthwork, and wetland mitigation. Visitor orientation, accessibility, safety, and site connectivity were all included as important design considerations. In leading the design, Otak also developed the NEPA Environmental Assessment and worked closely with representatives from the Chinook Indian Nation and other tribes throughout the course of the project.
With great success generating interest in natural landscapes have come great challenges in preserving them.
An iconic steward of American history and culture, the National Park Service (NPS) is an organization with deep roots in maintaining our nation’s natural spaces and historical and cultural heritage. We have, among others, the efforts of Stephen T. Mather – the first Director of NPS in 1916 – to thank for building public and political support for national parks. His vision is one of trailblazing and appreciation for sublime natural landscapes. In fact, upon his death, a gold plaque was placed in every national park in the U.S., inscribed with “There will never come an end to the good he has done.” The practice of visitor use management (VUM) now carries on that tradition of doing good with our natural landscapes and historic places.
The Rise of Visitor Use
In the early years of the National Park Service, the challenge for Mather and others was to attract visitors to the national parks to build a constituency and the support needed to sustain them. Early campaigns to promote the national parks included development of grand hotels in crown jewel parks, like the Ahwahnee in Yosemite National Park and Paradise Inn in Mount Rainier National Park. Travel to the national parks by railroad was promoted as a thrilling adventure to explore the west. In the 1950’s, an effort referred to as “Mission 66” focused on building facilities and services to promote visitor use and recreation.
These efforts, coupled with the development of the interstate system, growing environmental awareness in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and increasing leisure time and wealth among Americans resulted in extraordinary growth in visitation to the National Park System. As the NPS celebrated its centennial in 2016, there were more than 300 million recreation visits to the National Park System that year.
Credit: National Park Service, South East Utah Group and Steve Bumgardner
Visitor Use Today: Success Fueling Challenges
In recent years, the trend of rising visitation to national parks has reached unprecedented levels, with several parks recording historic levels of monthly and annual visitation. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the outdoors representing a space for safe recreation, was a key factor in driving current trends and levels of visitation.
The rise in popularity of national parks is, without question, a story of great success. The millions of visitors to the National Park System have opportunities for profound experiences that can positively impact them for a lifetime. Yet, increasing amounts and types of visitor use in our national parks can present challenges too. For example, during busy periods in some parks, lines of traffic may form at park entrances, visitors may have difficulty finding parking, and crowding may occur in visitor centers, on trails, and at attractions.
We work with our clients to help them address these opportunities and challenges through the practice of visitor use management. In Mathers’ spirit, we seek to understand how people interact with a park’s significant resources in a meaningful way to develop a deeper appreciation of and sense of stewardship for America’s natural, historical, and cultural heritage.
In this piece, we take a deep dive into the practice of visitor use management and explain how it provides a framework for our work with our clients.
What Does Visitor Use Management Mean?
Visitor use management is the proactive and adaptive practice of identifying strategies and actions to accommodate visitor use while protecting park resources as well as the quality and character of visitor experiences.
Not only is visitor use management relevant to our work, it’s also relevant to anyone who may visit a national park or related protected area. It’s the art of articulating desired conditions for park resources and visitors’ experiences and evaluating on-the-ground practices to learn and adapt over time.
A Dual-Mission Land Use Mandate
Visitor use management is a balancing act. Professionals in this sphere need to be mindful of their goals — providing opportunities for people to enjoy these sites and understanding how that affects park resources, park operations, and the experiences of other visitors. Effective visitor use management incorporates environmental ethics and education, ultimately encouraging visitors to become stewards of national parks and everything they represent.
All things considered, the goal is ultimately to strike a proper balance between the opportunities and challenges presented by national parks. The visitor use management framework is designed to provide a systematic basis for helping address these challenges.
Why Use A Visitor Use Management Framework?
Developed by the Interagency Visitor Use Management Council (IVUMC), the IVUMC Framework provides a systematic, transparent, and legally defensible method for putting visitor use management principles into practice.
The framework has deep historical roots in how visitor use of national parks, national forests and similar public land recreation areas have been monitored and adaptively managed. The framework represents the latest iteration of a long-standing commitment to indicator-based, adaptive visitor use management.
Elements of a Visitor Use Management Framework
Together, the elements of the visitor use management framework are grounded in thinking about and developing statements of desired conditions while establishing indicators that can be monitored in the process of meeting those conditions.
The visitor use management framework provides a guide for navigating the process of defining those elements and there are some key concepts incorporated into the framework:
Establishing Desired Conditions
Desired conditions represent an important part of the foundation for addressing visitor use management in parks. Desired conditions are narrative statements that describe the ideal quality, character, and conditions of park resources to be protected while considering visitor experiences that enhance public use and enjoyment.
It is the responsibility and privilege of the National Park Service to specify desired conditions for national park resources and visitor experiences.
Identifying Indicators
Indicators are measurable proxies for desired conditions that can be monitored to track changes in park resources and visitors’ experiences associated with recreation use. For example, the number of encounters with other groups per hour while hiking is an indicator related to the quality and character of visitors’ experiences.
Good indicators are those that can be easily and reliably measured, are related to and representative of desired conditions, and are responsive to visitor use management actions. In cases where managing use according to numeric user capacities is needed, indicators must also be directly related to the amounts and types of recreation use.
Types of Indicators
Social indicators, such as hiking encounters, the number of people at one time at boat ramps, and similar, tend to be directly related to changes in the types and amounts of recreation use and provide a reliable basis for managing recreation use according to numeric user capacities, where necessary.
In contrast, natural resource-related indicators generally do not have direct and reliably quantifiable relationships to recreation use levels except in extreme low use situations (e.g., trail-less/cross country zones, foot trails with less than 50 to 250 hikers per year). Nonetheless, resource-related indicators should be monitored, and adaptive resource management actions should be taken to protect park resources from impacts.
Managing the characteristics of visitor use (e.g., to concentrate use on established trail treads, road surfaces, and other established recreation resources and facilities, to promote low-impact use behaviors and patterns, etc.) is the most effective method for limiting or reducing recreation use impacts to natural resource-related indicators.
Setting Thresholds and Triggers
Thresholds in visitor use management are the minimally acceptable conditions of indicators to maintain desired conditions. Thresholds should be precise, time-bounded, and outcomes of recreation use rather than types or amounts of recreation use themselves.
Like thresholds, triggers are quantifiable conditions of indicators; they represent points at which adaptive management actions are needed to ensure the conditions of indicators do not cross thresholds. In other words, triggers are designed to support proactive visitor use management to protect park resources and visitors’ experiences from adverse impact, while allowing for recreation use and public enjoyment.
Estimating Numeric User Capacities
When they are necessary, numeric user capacities are estimated based on quantifiable relationships between the types and amounts of recreation use and the conditions of use-related indicators. The best available data are used to estimate the maximum amount of recreation use that can be accommodated without crossing thresholds for user capacity indicators.
For example, trail counter data could be correlated with observations from encounter patrols to estimate the maximum number of people who can hike in a river corridor without crossing a threshold for the number of encounters hikers have with other groups per hour or day. Numeric user capacities are not always needed or applicable.
Developing Visitor Use Management Strategies
Within the IVUMF, visitor use management strategies and actions are developed to achieve desired conditions.
Visitor use management strategies and actions are generally categorized as indirect techniques designed to achieve desired conditions without directly regulating visitors’ choices and behaviors, or direct techniques that may be required when indirect techniques are not enough.
Indirect techniques aim to influence or modify behavior
Direct techniques regulate behavior
Long-Term Monitoring and Adaptive Management
A systematic monitoring program provides the structure to measure indicators and assess their conditions in relation to triggers and thresholds on a recurring basis. Monitoring results provide the basis to determine if actions are needed to adapt management of recreation use to protect natural, cultural, and historical resources from adverse impacts.
Visitor Use Management Use Cases
While still fairly new in practice (the IVUMC was founded in 2011) applications of the visitor use management framework have quickly become prevalent in the National Park System as well as other public land recreation areas.
Acadia National Park provides unique and important recreation opportunities to regional, national, and international visitors. In 2021, the National Park Service (NPS) reported just over four million recreation visits to the park, marking an increase of over 50% in the past decade. This surge in visitation created a number of visitor use management challenges in the park.
The United States Forest Services is responsible for managing Wild and Scenic Rivers on lands within their jurisdiction. Part of this responsibility includes fulfilling the visitor use management and visitor capacity mandate of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968).
Over the years, the Jefferson County Open Space (JCOS) system in Colorado experienced rapid growth in visitation numbers. Various issues were addressed by applying visitor use management principles to develop an access management strategy for popular sites in the JCOS system.
The United States Forest Service is responsible for managing Wild and Scenic Rivers on lands within their jurisdiction. Part of this responsibility includes fulfilling the visitor use management and visitor capacity mandate of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968).
Long-Term Monitoring and Adaptive Management for WSR Corridors
The Otak visitor use management team works with the USFS to measure recreation use, formulate desired conditions, indicators, and thresholds, estimate visitor capacities, and develop long-term monitoring and adaptive management plans for WSR corridors. We design methods to address a full spectrum of landscape-scale river corridor settings and uses, often in locations with no discrete access points or restricted hours of operation. Our work includes developing recreation use statistics, user capacity methods and estimates, and monitoring plans for six river corridors in San Bernardino National Forest and two in Inyo National Forest.
Acadia National Park provides unique and important recreation opportunities to regional, national, and international visitors. In 2021, the National Park Service (NPS) reported just over four million recreation visits to the park, marking an increase of over 50% in the past decade. This surge in visitation created a number of visitor use management challenges in the park.
A Visitor Use Management Framework to Address Surging Recreation
The Otak visitor use management team worked with the NPS to apply the Interagency Visitor Use Management Framework to address visitor use management, visitor capacities, and long-term monitoring parkwide in Acadia National Park. We led visitor capacity workshops, helped NPS identify desired conditions, indicators, and thresholds, collected visitor use data in the park, and developed statistical and simulation models of visitor use. We conducted scenario analyses to estimate visitor capacities for the most popular areas of the park. The results of our work provided a data-driven basis for visitor capacities, visitor use management strategies, and long-term monitoring protocols specified in the park’s 2019 Transportation Plan, including the vehicle reservation system for Cadillac Mountain.
Over the years, the Jefferson County Open Space (JCOS) system in Colorado experienced rapid growth in visitation numbers. Certain park access areas no longer supported visitor demand during peak season and/or during peak hours as a result, generating congested and sometimes unsafe experiences for visitors. Plans to address a variety of these issues would be put in place with steps in visitor use management.
Solving Park Issues with a Tailored Visitor Use Management Approach
Because some parks have finite space and infrastructure to support current visitor and vehicle use levels, they struggle with a variety of congestion-related issues, all of which include safety concerns. In order to address various issues from trailhead congestion, multimodal access and impacts to natural resources, JCOS worked with Otak and CDR Associates to develop an access management strategy for popular sites across the system by applying visitor use management principles. The resulting access management report evaluated all relevant considerations within a National Park Service tested process to design an approach specific to JCOS for planning and implementation.
In developing an important baseline description of visitor use levels, a range of data was collected for a subarea of the High Peaks Wilderness in the Adirondack Park, NY. A study was designed to measure various aspects of visitor use conditions in order to inform future planning that addresses the impacts of increasing visitor use pressure.
A Study of Baseline Conditions for Future Visitor Use Planning
From roadside parking areas and trail corridors to key summits, the study was designed to capture descriptive data for a comprehensive look at baseline conditions in a subarea of the High Peaks Wilderness. Indicators for the study include number of intergroup (visitor-to-visitor) encounter rates, number of people at one time on mountain summits, and daily versus weekend trail use. A total of 497 person-hours and 21,228 hours of trail use data were collected across 7 locations. The team processed all study data to produce statistical summaries and estimated relationships among visitor use levels and conditions. Findings from this study provide an important understanding of visitor use in the High Peaks region for planning designed to meet desired conditions and have the potential to help inform formal visitor use management strategies for the High Peaks.
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