Tristin Waggener at Jackson Lake
Published March 25, 2025
By Tristin Waggener
My project has three main goals: Estimating recreation demand using a novel dataset. By novel I mean that the data I have acquired isn't usually meant for what I am doing. Then, I am interested which site characteristics of lakes and reservoirs determine demand. Where do people choose to go and what effect might changes have? Right now, I am mostly looking at the fishing experience. Lastly, I would like to think about how different climate scenarios with the uncertainty behind them might affect these characteristics and consequently visitation.
Outputs I want to create are the expected or predicted number of trips to each of the key sites I'm looking at. On an individual level, why visitation patterns might be different among people who come from different places, and on aggregate, how many trips do we expect to see at the different sites? I can also use these measures to get an idea of people's implicit willingness to pay for these things, getting an actual dollar value on them. And then I can think about how that has changed over time for different sites or how it might change in the future.
I am working with two data sets at the moment, both from Wyoming Game and Fish. The first one is invasive species check station data for the last six years. All around the state, Game and Fish runs check stations with the primary goal of monitoring and preventing invasive species being brought into lakes and reservoirs. They register where people are coming from, where they are going and what type of vessel they have. They register which state issued the license plate of their vehicle and, for Wyoming, the county. This helps me get an idea of the travel cost people are incurring. Since the access cost to the sites is fairly negligible, to get an idea of how much people are actually willing to pay, we look at how much they spent travelling to the site. I'm only looking at people with watercraft going through these stations, and there's obviously more people than just those with boats and kayaks who interact with the lakes and fish.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department conducts watercraft inspections at border locations and major waters around the state.
Photo courtesy of Wyoming Game and Fish
The second set of data I have is for site characteristics. Game and Fish reports deal with the species composition at the different sites and their size and weight distributions. I'm looking at four sites right now: Jackson, Flaming Gorge, Glendo and Pathfinder. I'm able to pull data to think about trends, and these measures might be useful to predict decision making.
I plan to use two main models. The first is a single-site model. Because it looks at each site individually, I only need data for one specific site at a time. I think it's a good first exploratory step to see if the relationships I'm looking for actually exist on the data. Since any coefficient I get from this will be site specific, I need to run a multi site model to find out how site changes are affecting one another. This takes a bit more work, both in actually running the estimation, but also the data requirements. I have to select a pool of sites that I deem to be representative of all the visitation in Wyoming, which could be every lake, reservoir, river, or it could be a smaller subset. Then, I have to get the same kind of data for all of them. I can then see how changes in one site might affect visitation to the other sites in the state. As we see people move away from one, how do they move to other ones? If we see changes in quality across the board, what kind of effects does that have?
Recreation on lakes and rivers: UW Alum Joseph Shumway boating in Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area.
The scenic Bighorn River meanders through a deep canyon and then into the sprawling Bighorn Lake reservoir just east of Lovell, Wyoming.
Source: University of Wyoming image database
I now want to start running these models and do the welfare analysis. Once I'm done with that, I would like to consider how different climate factors can affect these characteristics. For the time being, it is all about fishing, but I can see how there are other factors for these lakes and reservoirs that could have effects from different climate scenarios. Running the models again with these different scenarios and potentially getting actual dollar values on those effects could be really useful.
I've also been working with two other WyACT members, Willie Fetzer and Tristan Blechinger, thinking about how to best use the data I already have. We could turn it into something useful for thinking about the abundance, quality, or composition of these different lakes and reservoirs, and use those as measures, where it would be easy to interpret the effects of these parameters.”