I will be very interested in seeing the new report.  In 2004 I conducted a
study of visitors to the Magee Marsh board walk on IMBD (Saturday May 8 of
that year)  Prior to my study no prior work had counted both vehicles and
actual people on the boardwalk using a consistent method and multiple
samples.  My findings were very different from all previous studies, all of
which relied heavily on estimates of some variable, rather than actual
counts of vehicles and people in the immediate boardwalk area

Some highlights of what I found:

Peak number of people per vehicle: 1.78 between 0830 and 1030

Maximum number of vehicles: 540 at 1030 (at this time the parking areas
were nearly at capacity)

Maximum people on the boardwalk: 864 at 1030 (1.6 people per vehicle at
this time)

Based upon these data I calculated the maximum number of possible visitors
(assuming 100% turnover per 2 hour period) to be 2822 on that day.  Because
100% turnover is very improbable I calculated the actual number of visitors
to be in the range of 1000-1400 people on that day, based upon a 30-50%
turnover in the periods after 1030.


After conducting this study and publishing on this list serve, I received a
formal warning from ODW that conducting such a study without prior
permission was against division regulations. While I would like to conduct
such a study again I question if I could get permission to do so.


If anyone is interested in the entire study you can contact me via email.
 If a study is conducted that does not count both vehicles and people I
would say it has a major flaw in design.  Ideally a study should count
vehicles, people and have a means of measuring  actual turnover, rather
than estimating turnover as I was forced to do.  Also it is easy enough to
look at the boardwalk parking area and count the number of places on Google
Earth.  I would suggest doing this as a quick test of the accuracy of any
car count.

Haans Petruschke
Kirtland

______________________________________________________________________

Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society.
Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list.
Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/.

You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS
Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]