Understanding Visitors to Wildlife Management Areas in Minnesota.

Abstract

In Minnesota, the Wildlife Management Area (WMA) system encompasses more than 0.52 million hectares across 1,400 units. In order to better understand their visitors to these areas of high-quality habitat, wildlife managers want to know how many individuals use the WMA system and ultimately, the recreational experiences they are hoping to achieve. From September to December 2015, we counted vehicles using a randomized sample of WMA units in order to estimate total visitation during the fall 2015 hunting season. Our field observations were conducted during single point-in-time driving surveys that occurred over 10 weekends. We used a linear mixed-effects model to estimate visitation based on mean vehicle counts per site (averaged over the hunting season) and WMA site attributes (e.g., unit size, presence of popular game species, and distance to points of interest). We obtained a final estimate of 32,374 weekend user groups, 61,122 individual weekend visitors, and 130,942 total weekend visits to WMAs in our study area during the 2015-2016 hunting season. Using data obtained from a self-administered mail survey conducted in 2016, we examined the different recreational experiences hunters were pursuing on these areas. We used k-means cluster analysis to define unique clusters of users who recreated on WMAs during the fall 2015-2016 hunting season. We identified six clusters based on recreation experience preferences at WMAs. The clusters differed on demographic characteristics, as well as level of satisfaction with various experiences during their hunting trips to WMAs. The cluster of hunters with the highest overall satisfaction for WMAs also had the highest place and emotional attachment to these publically accessible areas. In addition, the cluster that showed the lowest satisfaction with WMA experiences was also the least supportive of management actions. This information will help wildlife managers understand their constituents, manage public lands, and help recruit, retain, and reactivate hunters into the activity.