Developing a recreation and aesthetic inventory framework for forest planning and management

Shifts in policy toward landscape-scale land management require that managers understand the role of natural areas within those areas' social contexts. Recreational use and aesthetic benefits are part of this social context. Natural areas managers, thus, are challenged to understand existing recreation management strategies in relation to the social niche of their natural areas. Many challenges to landscape management derive from insufficient information for decision making. This paper introduces a conceptual framework that identifies three types of information needed to better understand the role of a natural area in its regional context: information on recreational opportunities, visual attractiveness, and recreational use intensity. Sources of this information are identified and an application of the framework is presented.