In addition to the solitude that can come with remote locations, it is important that people in the watershed have the opportunity to experience nature near their homes. To assess recreational access, we measured the proportion of people with an outdoor recreational opportunity within 3 miles of their home.
How is it scored?
The indicator began by combining the U.S.D.A. Forest Service’s Recreation Opportunities, Arizona State Parks and Trails Statewide Trailhead, and Arizona State Parks and Trails Park Locations maps and clipping this map to the Watershed’s boundaries. Additional parks that offered outdoor recreation not included in these datasets, primarily those operated by municipalities, were then manually identified by the Report Card team in Google Earth Pro and added to the aforementioned map. Using this single recreational opportunties map we calculated the proportion of individuals with recreational opportunities within 3 miles of their home.
The 2025 report card scores for recreation access were calculated using a slightly different spatial dataset for population, but the data used in 2020 and 2025 both were based on Census data. Therefore, we would expect that the results are directly comparable.