Recreational site choice modelling using high-resolution spatial data

Geographic information systems (GIS) offer attractive tools for modelling recreational behaviour. In this paper GIS is combined with a discrete choice modelling approach to investigate the importance of landscape attributes for determining forest recreational choices. A new large Danish national dataset (28 947 recreational trips) is used in conjunction with an area information system and information on other site attributes to estimate a recreational choice model. A wide set of landscape characteristics influencing recreational choice is identified. These are the size of the forest patch and adjacency or distance to other land-cover types. The area of the forest patch was found to have a positive marginally declining effect. Adjacency to other seminatural areas was found to have a positive effect. The results show that the parameter estimates depend critically on the choice-set specification and that the size of the choice set needs to be considerably larger than previous research suggests.