01-executive-summary.Rmd

# Executive Summary 

Outdoor recreation and access to nature have well-documented positive impacts on mental physical well-being. Federal public land management agencies in the United States offer a wide variety of activities to visitors. However, people from different socioeconomic and identity groups access federal public lands unequally due to historical discrimination and current inequities. The multi-agency program, Recreation One Stop (R1S), oversees the operations of [Recreation.gov](https://www.recreation.gov/) and aims to increase access to recreation by providing online resources about nationwide recreational opportunities, allowing visitors to make reservations, and making the associated data accessible to all. The rich data on visitors that R1S collects presents an opportunity for the creation of more robust data-driven analytical tools to understand the patterns and correlations of this unequal access across the country and within individual recreation areas. Decision-makers can use these tools to explore and visualize how recreational opportunities on federal public lands are accessed. 

Our overarching objective is to design and built an interactive web application that allows users to  analyze patterns in the access and demand of visitors at reservable overnight sites (such as campgrounds, cabins, hike-in, and more), using data from the [Recreation Information Database (RIDB)](https://ridb.recreation.gov/landing) and the [United States Census Bureau (US Census)](https://www.census.gov/data.html). These analyses will allow federal public land managers to explore relationships among attributes of recreation opportunities, reservation practices, and socioeconomic data from the regions of visitor origin. We achieved this goal through the creation of an interactive web application, the [Outdoor Equity App](https://shinyapps.bren.ucsb.edu/oe_app/), that allows for a wide range of visualization, metadata documentation, and subset data downloads. This technical documentation serves to document the Outdoor Equity App creation process, include information for ongoing maintenance, and provide suggestions for future use and expansion. 

The app - which is implemented using the R programming language - accesses public RIDB and US Census data via direct download and application programming interfaces (API). All data and R code scripts are stored on the UCSB Taylor Server and version-controlled through GitHub. We isolated necessary variables and defined, standardized, and aggregated values in the data cleaning process. We calculated additional derived variables for each reservation, such as distance traveled and booking window, and summary statistics (e.g., mean and median) for census data at the ZIP code level. A data set that combines the US Census and RIDB data based on visitors’ home ZIP code is the foundation for the Outdoor Equity App. We visualized distributions of variables and relationships between them with simple, straightforward figures. Within the app, users can subset the data to a specific overnight reservable site and visualize the distribution of a single variable, the relationship between two variables, or the visitorshed map (i.e. area from where visitors are coming) for the selected site. The app currently only includes data for California reservable sites in fiscal year 2018 due to project scope limitations.

Throughout the analysis and app creation processes, external advisors and federal public land managers have reviewed and tested the Outdoor Equity App. We incorporated feedback into all parts of the processes to ensure our data, analysis, and final products are robust. Potential future updates to the Outdoor Equity App are discussed in this technical documentation and include temporal and spatial expansions and app maintenance. The temporal expansion would include cleaning additional datasets for years from 2012 to 2021 as well as expanding the app’s interface to allow for temporal selections when subsetting data. The spatial expansion would focus on updating the app structure and server hosting capabilities so the app runs smoothly with data from the full United States.

As environmental justice is increasingly recognized as a necessary lens to achieve environmental goals, equitable access to outdoor recreation is a high priority for managers. This tool assists managers to be equity-conscious decision-makers, can be a springboard for researchers who have questions about outdoor recreation, and strengthens nonprofit organizations’ advocacy efforts. We also hope it will be a dynamic tool that empowers visitors to access the information and resources they need to explore outdoor recreation.