Statistical Abstract: 2012

Street, Butch

In 2012 the national parks received nearly 283 million recreation visits, demonstrating strong public support for the parks. By documenting these visits across the National Park System, the National Park Service (NPS) Statistical Abstract offers a historical record of public use in NPS units and provides NPS staff and partners with a useful tool for effective management and planning. Public use records date back more than a century to 1904, when the national park idea was still new. In that first year (published in 1968 in Public Use of the National Parks: A Statistical Report, 1904–1940), six national parks reported their visitation, for a total of 140,954 visitors. By 1965, when the first annual abstract was produced, 199 NPS units reported a total of 121,312,000 visits. In 2012 those figures grew to 374 units reporting 282,765,682 recreation visits. The responsibility for compiling visitation records lies with the Public Use Statistics Office, part of the Social Science Branch of the Natural Resource Stewardship and Science Directorate’s Environmental Quality Division. In addition to the Statistical Abstract, the Public Use Statistics Office produces monthly visitation summaries and in-depth analyses examining changes in visitation over the decades, current trends in park visitation, and short-term visitation forecasts. These reports are available on the Public Use Statistics website at https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/. Additional reports prepared by the Social Science Branch (www.nature.nps.gov/socialscience) supplement public use information by exploring the attitudes, behaviors, and economic impacts of visitors and visitor use in parks. The Public Use Statistics Office relies on the conscientious efforts of NPS field staff to count, record, and report public use. A program of collecting and analyzing monthly public use data is combined with continuous auditing of park counting procedures to ensure consistency and accuracy of data. (In 2012, 374 of 398 NPS units collected public use data; the remainder are unable to do so for a variety of reasons, such as joint administration, staffing issues, and nonfederal land ownership. Detailed, unit-specific instructions for the units that collect data are available on the Public Use Statistics website.) The Public Use Statistics Office compiles and summarizes the monthly data to produce the annual Statistical Abstract.

Statistical Abstract: 2012

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