Estimating the value of recreation in the wilderness areas of US national forests

The value of recreation in wilderness areas of US Forest Service lands is estimated using a single-site travel cost model estimated with a Poisson distribution. Visitors are divided into their main activity groups, and ecoregions are included as covariates in order to observe more details in demand patterns. The results indicate that consumer behavior varies across main activity types and ecoregions. Aggregating over the number of annual US Forest Service Wilderness Area visitors found by the National Visitor Use Monitoring Program suggests that the annual aggregate value to all visitors is $196,842,000 when opportunity cost is not considered in the model and $605,162,000 when the opportunity cost of time is included.