Work With Us

Work with us

We are here to help land managment agencies, nonprofits, communities, foundations, and leaders understand recreation and tourism to advance science and meet their needs. If that interests you, please email us at cparkin2@uwyo.edu.

What we can do for an agency or community

Count and characterize visitors

Design and run visitor use monitoring programs that fit your budget and your questions, from field observations or remote monitoring to a multi-season mixed-methods study. We can also evaluate a monitoring program you already have.

Make sense of mobile location data

Cellphone tracking, mobility tracking, and other location-based services data are increasingly being pitched to parks and destination marketing organizations. We know what they’re good for, what they get wrong, and how to validate them before you write policy from them.

Map how people move

We can conduct GPS tracking, trajectory analysis, simulations, and spatial modeling that show where visitors actually go, when, and in what patterns, at the resolution of a trail junction to a whole region.

Prepare for emergencies

Evacuation and emergency preparedness research for recreation settings: surveys of who is on the ground and what they would do, stakeholder mapping, agent-based traffic simulation, and facilitated tabletop exercises that bring agencies and communities to the same table to create meaningful change.

Engage the community, not just the visitor

Interviews, participatory mapping, and public presentations that treat residents and gateway communities as partners in the research, and return findings to them in plain language.

Explore resources, processes, amenities, and community outcomes

We can work with communities and stakeholders to understand the data, processes, and amenities you already have understand your pathways to improved public health, adaptation, economic growth, and more.

Who we’ve worked with

National Park Service (Wrangell–St. Elias, Grand Teton, Grand Canyon), the UW–NPS Research Station, the Native Village of Chitina, and the communities of McCarthy, Kennicott, Chitina, and Gakona, Alaska. We have also collaborated with prominent researchers and scholars in the outdoor recreation and tourism management fields throughout the country and the world, and we are happy to bring those connections and relationships to any project to ensure we have the best team to address your needs.

Start a conversation

The easiest first step is a short email describing the place and the question. We’ll reply with an honest read on whether the lab is the right fit and what a project might look like.

Colby Parkinson, Ph.D. cparkin2@uwyo.edu
Crane Hall, Room 220
University of Wyoming, Laramie