Our Research.

GAIA Environmental Consulting brings extensive experience conducting data collection, visitor-use, socioeconomic, and field research in parks and protected areas. Our work has supported management decisions across a diverse range of landscapes, visitation levels, and community contexts.

Managing Visitor Use & Experience

Visitor Use Planning Management (VUPM)

Using data to understand and manage visitor use

Visitor use management is about more than counting visitors. Managers need to understand where people go, what they do, when and how they visit, how their use affects resources and other visitors, and what conditions they want to achieve. GAIA helps collect and analyze the information needed to answer these questions and support informed visitor-use decisions.

Our work aligns with the Visitor Use Management Framework developed by the Interagency Visitor Use Management Council, which provides a science-based process for defining desired conditions, understanding visitor use and its effects, identifying management strategies, and monitoring conditions over time. The framework is designed to support everything from site-specific challenges to large-scale planning efforts.

GAIA's field research helps connect management goals with what is actually happening on the ground. We collect data on visitor use, experiences, behaviors, and conditions to help managers identify patterns, establish meaningful indicators, evaluate management strategies, and make defensible decisions about access, capacity, transportation, and visitor experience.

Understanding Visitors & Communities

Socioeconomic Monitoring (SEM)

Understanding visitors and the communities connected to protected areas

GAIA conducts socioeconomic research that helps park and protected-area managers better understand who is visiting, how they experience a place, what they do during their visits, and how visitation affects surrounding communities. Our work includes visitor surveys, field data collection, and analysis of visitor characteristics, behaviors, experiences, perceptions, and spending.

Our team has supported the National Park Service's Socioeconomic Monitoring (SEM) Visitor Survey, a long-term research program designed to build consistent, up-to-date information about visitors across a diverse range of national parks. SEM provides park-level and national-level data that can reveal patterns and trends in visitation over time and help managers make more informed decisions.

GAIA brings this same field-based, applied research approach to projects with unique management questions and local contexts. We help turn conversations with visitors and communities into reliable data and meaningful insights that managers can use to understand current conditions, track change, and plan for the future.