Federal land and water managers seek to meet current and future recreation demand. Improving our understanding of recreation-use patterns helps managers best address current and future needs. Current monitoring methods (e.g., visitor surveys and traffic counters) may not fully count visitors to dispersed or low-use recreation sites. Newly available approaches and technologies have the potential to improve how recreation managers measure recreation-use patterns on federally managed public lands. This information can inform decisions and allow agencies to allocate resources more effectively, identify emerging trends, and ensure that management strategies reflect the full range of public use.  

The Federal agencies invite public review and comment on proposed protocols for modeling recreation-use patterns across the Nation. These projects may model recreation-use patterns through established on-site techniques—such as trail counters—as well as emerging data sources and technologies such as anonymized data from mobile device locations, social media, and community science. The proposed projects make use of data from mobile devices, automated on-site counters, manual counts, GPS units, questionnaires, comment cards, game cameras, community science, and social media platforms. 

A 30-day public comment period is now open for the list of forty pilot projects at various locations across the Nation. To view the projects list, click the “Documents” tab at the top of this page to view the available documents. Comments will be accepted until July 29, 2026, electronically via the BLM ePlanning site. To provide comments, click on the “Participate Now” tab at the top of this page.