During visits to the Malheur National Forest this fall, you may notice some friendly faces stationed beside the road as you leave your favorite recreation site. These aren’t telemarketers but rather college under graduate and graduate students from West Virginia University who are completing a field practicum as part of their course work by collecting voluntary recreational visitor user surveys for the National Visitor Use Monitoring Program, according to a Forest Service press release.

The National Visitor Use Monitoring Program has two primary goals. First, the program aims to provide the Forest Service and Congress estimates of the volume of recreation visitation to National Forests and Grasslands. Second, the program produces descriptive information about that visitation, including activity participation, demographics, visit duration, measures of satisfaction, and trip spending connected to the visit. Surveyors use the same collection and analysis methods nationwide, so the program also provides a consistent data collection tool to analyze across all national forests. The National Visitor Use Monitoring Program was initiated in 1998 as a pilot project and is now conducted every five years on all national forests.

In order to gather this information, the Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service has partnered for 20 years with the University of West Virginia and Dr. Robert Burns, Professor and Director of Division of Forestry and Natural Resources, to offer this outdoor classroom experience with hands on learning. This fall, several students from West Virginia University traveled to rural eastern Oregon for this experience where the students are conducting surveys on the Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests.

Each student is provided a list of sites to survey, forest maps, district maps, radios, and guidelines. The sites are broken down into four types: developed day use sites, overnight-use developed sites, general forest areas, and wilderness areas. The students are stationed at exit points and high traffic locations to try and capture the most visitors who volunteer for the survey.

The survey results are not used at a site-specific level but rather a large scale Forest-wide view. These results are used in a variety of ways. The statistical results are sent to Congress. The Forests use the customer satisfaction results to make site improvements. Additionally, the survey results can be helpful information for individuals and organizations with inquiries on various recreational areas and experiences.

How does the survey work? The students are stationed at each site for six hours. The students will stop a forest visitor as they are exiting the area where they are stationed. The students have four different surveys, which focus on the primary purpose of forest visits and secondary activities. At a minimum, the students try to capture the Forest visitor’s home zip code.

At times, getting forest visitors to voluntarily participate in the survey can be challenging, which can make it difficult to collect data. Because of this, the National Visitor Use Monitoring Program also relies on 24-hour traffic counters. The students leave these counters on the road after their shift and then later return to pick them up. The counter captures the number of cars that cross over it during that time period. The information received from these counters captures the total number of vehicles, not specifically recreational visitors.

While portions of this job may appear tedious, the students who participate in the experience, love it. Most of these students have never been to eastern Oregon. Many of them are interested in careers in natural resources and use the opportunity to get exposure to the national forests and learn from FS recreation manages.

Additional information about the National Visitor Use Monitoring Program can be found at: http://www.fs.fed.us/recreation/programs/nvum/.

For further information on the Malheur National Forest, please visit us at www.fs.usda.gov/malheur or call the Supervisor’s Office at 541-575-3000.