Abstract
Data limitations have hampered our ability to estimate the potential impacts of climate change on outdoor recreation. Innovative reduced form methods using novel “big data” panel datasets have been integral to the growth of the literature on this topic but estimates from these models are likely to suffer from attenuation (Chan and Wichman 2022). In this research I plan to build on previous structural analyses of weather and outdoor recreation (e.g., Dundas and von Haefen 2020) and use “big data” to estimate the welfare impact of climate change on grassland recreation. This analysis will have two parts: the first focuses solely on recreation at 22 nationally prominent grasslands and how weather impacts visitation; the second examines substitution away from grassland recreation to more naturally shady sites like forests as an adaptation behavior using a subset of the original set of grasslands and nearby substitute sites. In this presentation, I will describe my dataset, its sources, and my analysis plan.
