Building on 2020’s “Economic Analysis of Outdoor Recreation in Washington State”, a coalition of state agencies tasked Earth Economics with a focused assessment of the total visitation, consumer spending, and economic output associated with outdoor recreation on state-managed lands. This analysis improves significantly on earlier efforts by leveraging voluntarily provided mobile device locational data throughout 2019 and 2020 to generate data-driven estimates of the total economic contribution of visitors to state-managed recreation lands, detailed at more granular geographic and temporal scales.
Earth Economics worked with Washington DNR and Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics to include non-market ecosystem services benefits into DNR’s Trust Land Performance Assessment (TLPA), a comprehensive assessment of the value of trust lands. The results of our report demonstrate that maintaining state trust lands as working forests and agricultural lands creates value far beyond the revenue they generate.
Across Oregon, there are thousands of recreation sites and opportunities to hike, camp, bike, picnic, hunt, kite surf, and more; and each year, billions of dollars are spent by folks enjoying Oregon’s outdoors. Recognizing that outdoor recreation is a major contributor to the state’s economy, Travel Oregon, the Oregon Office of Outdoor Recreation (OREC), and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) united to commission a study on the impacts of the outdoor recreation economy. This study highlights the meaningful contributions of economic impacts generated by Oregonians and visitors that recreate in our vast and abundant outdoors.
