The National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation (FHWAR) has been conducted on a repeating basis since 1955.  It is widely recognized as the most comprehensive ongoing source of data on participation and expenditures related to fishing, hunting, and other wildlife-related activities. As with many surveys, rising costs of data collection have necessitated changes to survey and sample design, limiting the scale of FHWAR operations. Furthermore, expansions to instrument content have created increased response burden and reduced sample.

This paper details a small area model-based approach to derive state-level estimates, based on response values from 2016 National survey data, for three activity indicators—number of participants, days spent afield on the activity and total annual expenditures—for each of the three major activities: fishing, hunting, and wildlife-associated recreation. The paper includes analysis of performance diagnostics across several model specifications and parameter estimation procedures. Results recommend distinct model-specification and estimation procedures for each estimated indicator-activity type, and findings overall demonstrate the improvements model-based techniques provide as compared with direct survey estimates.

The spreadsheet contains the state-level modeled estimates of fishing, hunting, and wildlife-watching participation along with their margins of error.  These estimates are the results of the methodology described in the paper.