Extending Exeter University's Outdoor Recreation Valuation Tool

The Outdoor Recreation Valuation tool (ORVal) is a web application developed by the Land, Environment, Economics and Policy (LEEP) Institute at the University of Exeter with funding support provided by DEFRA. The primary purpose is to provide information that might be useful to government, businesses and communities in understanding the benefits that are derived from accessible greenspace in England, for example, as part of strategic or project appraisal, policy evaluation or natural capital accounting.

The ORVal tool is based on a sophisticated model of recreational demand for outdoor green space estimated from data collected in the annual Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment (MENE) survey. The model can be used to estimate the levels of visitation to existing or newly created green spaces and to derive monetary measures of the value households attach to the recreational opportunities provided by those sites. The ORVal tool allows users to access the power of this tool through a map-based web interface.

This project builds on the original ORVal prototype enabling several significant extensions to the underlying statistical model and to the functionality provided by the ORVal Tool. Amongst the most important of those extensions will be to broaden the tool coverage from England to other countries in the UK, to include household's choice of transport mode in traveling to green spaces in order to better capture key decisions in recreation demand behaviour, to extend the model in order to better capture the impact of qualities of greenspaces on site choice, to allow users the option to estimate values and visits to a series of new sites uploaded as a batch directly to ORVal, to add functionality that provides a heat map of locations where a userdefined new recreation site might generate the greatest benefits, and to improve ORVal's search capabilities, it's presentation of results disaggregated across socioeconomic groups and the formats through which outputs can be downloaded by users.

The outcome of the project will be a significantly improved ORVal tool that has been updated to meet many of the requests for extended functionality called for by users in response to the successful launch of the prototype tool.