Relative recreation use in National Forest System firesheds from 2015-2023

This data publication contains vector data, provided as a shapefile and a geopackage, representing relative visitation estimated at the fireshed level within each unit and region of the National Forest System (NFS). This includes all lands managed by the USDA Forest Service located within the contiguous United States and Alaska. Relative visitation was estimated using digital mobility data (geolocated social media posts and mobile phone location data). Data include estimates of average annual visitation to each fireshed between 2015 and 2023, relative to all the others in each USDA Forest Service (USFS) unit and NFS region for 2,793 NFS fireshed polygons.
Across the United States, National Forests and Grasslands receive more than 161 million visits each year (USDA Forest Service 2023). The Forest Service, like other federal and state public land managers, uses on-the-ground counting systems, visitor surveys, and reservation and permit data to measure recreation use and describe the characteristics of visitors (English et al. 2020). Although those on-the-ground approaches provide reliable information, the resulting data are sometimes not extensive enough to address emerging questions at the spatial scales needed for planning. New approaches that use digital mobility data, such as geolocated social media posts and mobile phone locations, can fill in some of the gaps in traditional recreation monitoring data (Merrill et al. 2020, Wood et al. 2020, Wilkins et al. 2024, Winder et al. 2025, Tsai et al. 2023, Sessions et al. 2016, Tenkanen et al. 2017). These data, created using these new approaches, provide estimates of recreation use by fireshed, which is the spatial resolution that is commonly used in landscape prioritization for fuels reduction and other forest management. These data could be used to understand how the distribution of recreation use compares to the locations of management actions, incorporate human values in landscape prioritization efforts, or characterize the extent of recreation use potentially affected by management actions or landscape fuels reduction outcomes.
For additional information about the utility of digital mobility data in estimating recreation visitation, see Wood et al. (2020) and Tsai et al. (2023).