An individual-based modeling approach to simulating recreation use in wilderness settings

Landscapes protect biological diversity and provide unique opportunities for human-nature interactions. Too often, these desirable settings suffer from extremely high visitation. Given the complexity of social, environmental and economic interactions, resource managers need tools that provide insights into the cause and effect relationships between management actions and social and environmental outcomes. Object-oriented technology, along with spatial gee-referenced temporal data, provides new opportunities for developing, testing and improving simulation models. This paper describes a case study in Sedona, Arizona, that utilizes prototype software package the Recreation Behaviour Simulator (RBSim), to dynamically simulate the behavior of human recreationists' in high-use natural environments.