Large Recreation Declines Persist for Years After Severe Wildfire but Not After Low-Severity or Prescribed Fire

Citation

Manley, K., Wood, S., Evers, C., Nowell, H., LoPresti, A., Siegel, K., … & Dee, L. (2026). Large Recreation Declines Persist for Years after Severe Wildfire but Not after Low-Severity or Prescribed Fire. ESS Open Archive. doi.org/10.22541/essoar.15002752/v1

Link to file

Decisions about managing fires on public lands often focus on safety and protecting property, but they sometimes overlook how people enjoy nature and the other personal benefits it provides. One reason is that there hasn’t been much research on how fires change the way people connect with the outdoors. This is especially important in the Western U.S., where most of the roughly 1 billion annual visits to public lands happen and where wildfires are becoming bigger and more intense.

This research shows that very severe wildfires lead to large and lasting drops in outdoor recreation. On the other hand, controlled burns and smaller, low-intensity wildfires don’t harm recreation and can even have positive effects. These results suggest that fire management should consider not just safety and ecology but also how nature contributes to people’s well-being, and they can help guide equitable, climate-focused investments in communities that are most at risk from climate change.

Abstract

Wildfire and recreational use of public lands have surged, particularly across the US West. In response to intensifying wildfire, land managers are also expanding prescribed fire for fuel-reduction. Yet how either fire type reshapes visitation, remains poorly quantified, limiting managers’ ability to account for important hidden values provided by public lands. We analyze wildfire and prescribed fire sites (N = 185 and 54, respectively) across California and Colorado public lands, advancing a casual inference approach that leverages 11 million digital-mobility observations, from cell phones, social media, and citizen science apps, in a visitation model. This is the first landscape-scale causally-identified estimate of how fire type, severity, and social-ecological context shape public land visitation over time. Wildfires reduced visitation (-8% to -18% one year post-fire), with impacts scaling with severity. High-severity fires in California produced persistent losses (-33% year one; -44% year five), whereas low-severity effects remained near-neutral across both states. Forested sites drove losses while grassland fires produced minimal impacts. Prescribed fire effects were state-dependent (positive in Colorado, negative in California) but transient, with no effect after three years. High-recreation counties experienced disproportionate wildfire impacts in Colorado (-11% vs. -2%) and in California for high-severity fires (-28% vs -8%). Fire characteristics and social-ecological systems jointly determine recreational outcomes and provide empirical foundations for fire management that accounts for recreational use and its value. We provide a novel addition to quantify the value of non-material contributions of nature at the state level, expanding our ability to measure cultural ecosystem services at scale.