A recently completed survey shows Wrangellites value recreational uses for the Tongass Forest more than other uses.
Britta Schroeder, formerly of the Wrangell Ranger District, but now
living and working in Denali Forest Park and Preserve, will present a speech reviewing 200 results from local
residents conducted about a year ago. In the survey, people were asked to place acceptable uses on a map of the Wrangell Ranger District to indicate areas where they found management strategies acceptable, and areas where they found certain management strategies and uses unacceptable, Schroeder said.
Schroeder developed the idea through her work at the Wrangell Ranger District on an environmental impact statement for a large timber sale on Wrangell Island. Work on the EIS has been
underway for about four years, Schroeder said.
“As an employee there, working on this sale, on these proposed alternatives, I got really curious about how people in the community feel about this,” she said.
The survey had two forms: an
internet-based form and a traditional paper form. Internet respondents were allowed to place as many locations as they wanted on the map, while paper respondents were limited to five stickers, Schroeder said. She applied a
system of statistical weights to account for sampling bias and correlated her information with census data. The
stickers (icons on the web version) represented up to 13 possible categories of use.
“Basically, people valued recreation more than anything else,” she said. “They placed more recreation values on the forest than any other type of value. They also placed more acceptable recreation facility uses on the forest than anything else.”
Not only that, respondents were more likely to use all their recreation stickers than they were to use the maximum number of stickers for other categories, Schroeder said.
“It wasn’t just the frequency of points that were mapped, but it was the people mapping points, and the number of people mapping their maximum number of points,” she said. “I believe it was something like 82 people mapped their maximum recreational value.”
The survey also revealed differences in which areas were preferred for recreation based on the length of time an individual spent in Wrangell. Long-time Wrangell residents were more likely to include areas that recent immigres didn’.
“Long-term residents remember being able to do these things at these locations,” she said.
Etolin Island and the Anan Bear Observatory came up.
Schroeder’ Chautauqua lecture will take place 7 p.m. this evening at the Nolan Center classroom.
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