Towards a comprehensive social and natural scientific forest-recreation monitoring instrument—A prototypical approach

Abstract Forestpolicy planning and broad-scale management is often based on forest inventorydata in many countries. However, the importance of social aspects such as aesthetic and recreationalvalues is increasing, especially in urban areas, and need to be considered in forestry practice. We conducted a forestvisitor survey at selected National Forest Inventory(NFI) sample plots in order to test whether this would be a way of integrating the social dimension of forestwith national forest inventoriestoward a more comprehensive forestmonitoring instrument, focusing on forest recreationand aesthetics. Visitors were asked to rate the visual attractiveness of the NFI plot and the surrounding forest. Multi-level modeling combining both plot-related inventory data and visitor-related questionnaire data showed that perceived forestattractiveness is determined by both social and physical factors. We conclude that it is worth further developing this method with the aim of implementing forestvisitor surveys at a subset of NFI plots during routine field assessments, and, thus, significantly improving monitoring of forest recreation.