Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Current And Historic Visitor Experiences In Coastal Alaskan Wilderness: Visitor Motivations And Experience Quality In Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve, Gabriella R. Furr

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Visitors to parks and protected areas (PPAs) engage in a variety of activities and choose different modes of travel, especially when the location itself has few limitations, such as open-water settings with relatively few backcountry visitors. Managers must understand why visitors are recreating in a particular place and the quality of their experiences in order to offer appropriate and meaningful opportunities. This study seeks to better understand visitor motivations (the “why”), to develop and measure effective indicators for evaluating the quality of visitor experiences, and to contextualize these findings with a unique investigation of historical Glacier Bay National Park data. …

The Value Of Farmland: Mapping Assessor Data To Understand Land Use Change, Lyndi Perry

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Ideas developed by regional economists have potential applications within the urban planning field. One potential application is toward conserving farmland, and within this thesis this topic is examined for the study area of Utah County, Utah. Using assessor data, a land value map is created and further used to develop a regional economic model and spatial models that were analyzed for patterns of land use change.

Findings show that representing land value as continuous surface maps is a useful approach. The maps reveal that Utah County has densified as its population increased while farmland loss still occurred in agriculturally-important areas. …