Outdoor Recreation Activity and Asset Inventory

Build Your Team

Before you start your research and inventory work, assemble your local team. Bring together those individuals who are knowledgeable, interested, and passionate about documenting the full range of outdoor recreation activities and assets in your community.

If your core team members are, for instance, avid hikers, birders, and flatwater paddlers make sure to find those other folks who know about snowmobiling, mountain biking, hunting, endurance running, or horseback riding opportunities and infrastructure in your community. Be curious. Everyone will most likely learn something new about their community’s recreational activities going through this process.

Start Your Activities List

We make lists every day: shopping lists, to-do lists, gift lists. Don’t overthink this step. Dive right in and start your list of outdoor recreation activities in your community based on what your group knows.

Tap into your team’s local knowledge, gather and consult maps, and spend some time researching online. Consider all seasons and types of users, from residents to visitors, children to seniors, casual walkers to intense athletes, and motorized trail users. Make a shared document or spreadsheet that your team members can add to and edit.

Now is not the time to identify all the trail systems that may be present in your town. That comes later. If your community has lots of diverse trails, simply note that hiking, mountain biking, cross-country skiing, and trail running are important outdoor recreation activities in your community.

Once your team has developed its preliminary list of important outdoor recreation activities, try to go deeper. The range of outdoor recreation activities that happen in New Hampshire is broad! The downloadable Master Recreational Assets List provides a comprehensive list of activities that happen across the state. It organizes outdoor recreation by infrastructure-dependent activities and non-infrastructure dependent activities. Review this list to see if there might be activities of local importance about which your planning team members have less understanding.

• Talk to local landowners, conservation groups, outdoor clubs, and recreation departments about the outdoor activities that take place within their respective domains.
• Engage local outfitters or guide services, bike or ski shops that rent equipment, or Chamber of Commerce or tourism board members to learn more about who participates in these activities and why.
• Think across the age spectrum and seek to learn from school outdoor program leaders and youth participants about their outdoor programming and favorite activities.

For an in-depth list of potential community partnerships, see the Partnerships and Regional Collaboration tool.

Capture your insights along the way. As you complete your list and learn more about important outdoor activities through your research, be sure to note any interesting findings that surface, for instance:

• What are the most popular activities?
• What are the emerging activities that are becoming more popular?
• Who are the dominant and/or types of participants within each activity and where do they come from?
• What are some of the reasons that these activities are important economically, socially, or culturally? 

Identify and Describe Your Assets

Once you have completed your inventory of important outdoor recreation activities, the next step is to identify the existing on-the-ground assets that support these activities. For each activity you identified, now is the time to document in greater detail the physical spaces and infrastructure that makes these activities possible in your community. Having detailed and site-specific information about recreational assets will allow you to begin making more informed and accurate decisions about future improvements, maintenance, and new developments.

Assets can be natural, built, or managed spaces that support recreation. These may include:

• Open space parcels and public lands (town forests, privately owned conservation lands and preserves, state parks, national forests, etc.);
• Trails (hiking, ADA compliant, backpacking, motorized uses, multi-use bike paths, rail trails, skiing);
• Waterbodies and water access points (lakes, ponds, rivers, beaches, launch points, swimming holes, etc.);
• Site-specific attractions, infrastructure, or other points of interest (parking areas and trailheads, scenic viewpoints or roadside pull-offs, fire towers, overlook waterfalls, picnic areas, etc.);
• Routes (Scenic byways, quiet gravel roads for biking and walking, etc.); or
• Overnight sites (campgrounds, tent sites, lean-tos, lodges, huts, etc.)

Create a structured list or table of your community’s assets. Consider organizing this list by:

• Asset name
• Activity(ies) supported and/or allowed uses
• Landowner or manager (town, state, federal, nonprofit, club, etc.)
• Asset details (miles of trail, size of property, number of parking spaces, type of boat launch, accessibility considerations, etc.); and
• Any management concerns or issues (overcrowded parking on weekends, water quality issues in summer impacting swimming, maintenance concerns, etc.)

Where to Go Next

Congratulations on getting this far with your inventory work!

Assets can be natural, built, or managed spaces that support recreation. These may include:

• Mapping outdoor assets is essential for understanding where outdoor recreation happens within and around your community. See the Maps of Outdoor Recreation tool to learn how to compile and create the data sets that are necessary to produce planning maps that locate and show the distribution of outdoor assets in your community.
• Understanding the social and economic values of your outdoor assets requires additional data collection in order to better define the role of each location and activity. See the Economic Impact Analysis tool for a trail counting worksheet and the Destination Marketing and Management tool for a table of additional data collection techniques.
• Developing a full Community Recreation Profile helps tell the story of your outdoor recreation system and captures the breadth and depth of local opportunities, the condition and usage of key assets, the needs of different user groups, and future investment goals and objectives.