Horizon scanning data for the future of outdoor recreation on public lands

Horizon scanning involves searching both within and outside a topic or field of interest for signals of change. It is fundamental to strategic foresight projects and works by gathering “scan hits”: signals of potential change. Some scan hits are weak signals of change, others are strong signals; both are important to consider. This data publication includes a subset of recreation-related scan hits from the Forest Futures Horizon Scanning Project database. While the data indicate potential changes globally, the focus was changes that could have an impact on U.S. public lands over the next 30 years. The resulting data include the title and original URL (when live at time of publication) for the scan hits relevant to outdoor recreation, the tag which denotes the horizon and content tags used in the horizon scanning, and then an indication of which categories (activities, ecology related, place related, recreation management related, social related, technology related, and economy) and sub-categories the particular scan hit was coded to.
The purpose of this study was to use horizon scanning to develop a database of signals of change - strong and weak, internal and external - in order to develop ideas of the range of possible public lands recreation futures over the next 30 years. This, in turn, informs policy makers, planners, and practitioners, allowing them to envision futures that they can plan for now–-whether that planning aims at a specific future or tries to avoid or minimize negative possible future outcomes.
For more information about this study and these data, see Westphal (in review) and Hines et al. (2019).