Projects
Projects
Presenting findings to residents in McCarthy, Alaska.
Emergency management and resilience planning in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve
The McCarthy Road is a 60-mile gravel road that is the only way in or out for the communities of McCarthy and Kennicott and thousands of visitors who go to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve to tour Kennecott Historic Mines National Landmark, hike on the Root Glacier, and fligtsee. Wildfire, flooding, and washouts could (and have) closed the road with little warning. This project asks a simple question with a complicated answer: if a natural hazard like a wildfire threatened corridor, what strategies and tactics would help save the most lives?
We are answering it with mixed methods. Nearly 400 intercept surveys of residents and visitors to capture who is there, what they know, and what they would do. Stakeholder interviews with agency staff, business owners, and residents to map out the decisions and communication channels that an emergency response would depend on. Agent-based simulation of traffic on the roadway and in communities to test how those decisions play out under different fire scenarios. Final results are under review and (hopefully) will be published soon.
Beyond traditional data collection and analysis, we have gotten involved with communities and stakeholders along the road. In June 2026, we facilitated an interagency tabletop exercise in McCarthy with partners from the National Park Service, the State of Alaska, the Chitina Native Village, and the communities of McCarthy, Chitina, and Gakona, walking through a wildfire evacuation scenario together for the first time. We have also presented and sought feedback on findings from community members in Chitina, McCarthy, and Kennicott in 2025 and 2026. We have also played a role in the Native Village of Chitina’s Climate Change Adaptation Planning Committee.
E-bikes and cyclists on the Grand Teton multi-use pathway
E-bikes are changing who rides on park pathways and how far they go, but managers’ understanding of these trends has been limited. This project combined onsite observation, rider surveys, and GPS tracking to compare e-bikers with conventional cyclists based on their behaviors, sociodemographics, and degree of recreation specialization. Results have been reported to the park and presented at the George Wright Society’s ParkForum to inform e-bike policy on public lands. Final results are under review and (hopefully) will be published soon.
Validating mobile location data against GPS tracks at Grand Canyon
Commercial location-based services (LBS) data promise a view of visitor movement at a scale that no survey can match, but nobody had checked whether that view was accurate. Working from a South Rim visitor use study that handed GPS loggers to visitors as they entered the park, we compared LBS trajectories to what people actually did. The result, published in Sustainability, is one of the first direct validations of LBS data for park visitor behavior and a set of cleaning procedures now used in follow-on work.
Frameworks
Alongside site-specific work, the lab develops tools other researchers and managers can use. The Tourist Monitoring Compass, published in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Horizons in 2025, links the measurements available for nature-based tourism monitoring (counters, surveys, mobile data, social media) with the constructs managers care about, so that a monitoring program can be designed backward from the decision it needs to support.