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David Cole - Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute
Cooperators: Arthur Carhart Wilderness Training Center
BACKGROUND
Over the past half century of managing recreation in wilderness, many different techniques have been employed. The half century of experience represents a substantial knowledge base that has yet to be adequately captured. The experiential knowledge of managers is largely impressionistic and undocumented, although there are exceptions. There has been some monitoring of the effectiveness of techniques, as well as a few scientific studies.
This project represents an attempt to capture, organize and integrate both experiential and scientific knowledge about wilderness recreation management techniques. It builds on a 1987 report by David Cole, Margaret Petersen and Bob Lucas that described the most common recreation management problems and then listed the array of management techniques that might be effective in dealing with each of these problems. For each technique, information was provided about: purpose, how it works, how common it is being used, costs to visitors, costs to management, likely effectiveness and sources of further information. Click here to access an interactive version of the 1987 report or to download a hard copy of the report
CURRENT ACTIVITY
Current work involves (1) updating the 1987 report and (2) capturing the experiential knowledge of  managers regarding each of these management techniques.
Our vision is to create a web-based clearing house for managers to share their experiences with techniques that work well, techniques that do not work well and tips about implementation. The categories of problems and management techniques-from the updated 1987 report-provide the organizational framework for accessing this knowledge. Readers could search by problem, technique or wilderness for information that might help them.
Progress to date consists of (1) making the 1987 report available for downloading and (2) conducting interviews with about 15 long-term wilderness managers to gain information about their recreation management programs. The next steps are to revise the 1987 report, to refine the interviews to begin populating the database with useful information and, lastly, to develop strategies for getting managers to actively share their experiential knowledge.
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