Where do we recreate? Comparison of different methods to determine importance of site characteristics for outdoor recreation

Abstract

Residents of industrialized countries place increasingly more value on leisure time. For many alpine and remote municipalities, revenues from tourism and recreation belong to the most important sources of income. At the same time, these activities generate large carbon footprints through traffic. Identifying the drivers of demand for outdoor recreation is essential for a sustainable future transport and landscape planning. By using different types of regression models, we compared four different methods to determine the importance of variables quantifying landscape characteristics for explaining outdoor recreation day trips.