Hot routes in urban forests: The impact of multiple landscape features on recreational use intensity

Abstract It is well known that both built and natural landscape features contribute to recreational values of forests. Insights on visual preferences and visitor behaviour are used to meet societal demands for outdoor recreation in forests. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the hierarchy of importance of landscape features that characterise the surroundings of recreational routes for explaining activity-specific use intensity. Furthermore, urban forest managers lack reliable spatial information on which areas are most intensively used for recreation. Therefore, using Public Participation GIS (PPGIS), we invited residents of three densely populated regions in Germany’s Southwest to map their recreational routes in urban forests and report the respective type of activity. Overall, 1136 respondents participated in our study and mapped 2468 routes. We identified two main user groups – cyclists and pedestrians – and created maps that visualise their use intensity. We found recreational use intensity patterns differ for both the three study areas and type of activity. We used linear mixed effects models to identify the contribution of landscape features to overall, cyclists’, and pedestrians’ use intensity. Therefore, we measured area sizes of forest structural attributes, natural area features, and human-made infrastructure for each surrounding area of mapped routes (defined by a 50 m radius). For each mapped route, we calculated the total length of other routes that were within its surrounding area to operationalise recreational use intensity. Results showed that water bodies, broadleaved dominated stands, and unique structural compositions (represented by protected habitats) were among the most important landscape features that explained overall, cyclists’, and pedestrians’ use intensity. We found differences in the importance of landscape features for use intensities between cyclists and pedestrians. Our findings add to previous research since we present a hierarchy of importance of 14 landscape features for explaining residents’ self-mapped recreational behaviour in urban forests. Urban forest managers can use these results to promote outdoor recreation. Furthermore, our hot route maps may help integrating economic, ecological, and social objectives into management plans.