At a Glance

The newest visitation modernization effort builds on groundwork laid by VERS (Visitation Estimation & Reporting System) in the early 1990s to increase consistency of visitation estimates across projects. Improvements in basic procedures and processes, such as
• better alignment of traffic meter locations with best practices
• automated tools for survey planning and implementation
• new visitation surveys
• more rigorous methods of assigning load-factors to recreation areas that will not be surveyed will likely have a greater impact on achieving more consistent visitation numbers.

Accurate visitation numbers are important to the project and the district in many different aspects. Visitation numbers are exported into Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and OMBIL databases and then used to

• inform project management decision,
• in justifications for grant requests (Federal Lands Transportation Program/Federal Lands Access Program),
• Is shared publically and with elected officials via Value to the Nation fact sheets and Corps Lakes websites.
• in annual project RecAssessments,
• in a variety of management tools and documents and
• to helps consensus building with partners and stakeholders.

Visitation collection and estimation is a mandated requirement for all federal land management agencies. Having consistent and accurate visitation data benefits our nations programs tremendously by sharing a vision of use on our federal lands and waters.