Alan Graefe

Alan Graefe
Year Elected ALS Fellow: 
2006
Highest Degree: 
Ph.D., Texas A&M University, 1980
Current Position: 
Professor of Recreation, Parks and Tourism Management and Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Environment, The Pennsylvania State University
Bio: 

Alan Graefe teaches courses and conducts research about outdoor recreation behavior and management at the Pennsylvania State University. He was one of the developers of the Visitor Impact Management (VIM) framework for addressing visitor capacity issues, and was a co-founder of the Northeastern Recreation Research (NERR) Symposium. His principal research interests revolve around the application of social science to various aspects of recreation resources planning and management. He is also experienced with studies of environmental impacts of outdoor recreation and the integration of biological and visitor use data to address visitor capacity problems. He has conducted numerous visitor surveys in parks and other natural areas. Much of his research has focused on water-based recreation areas and activities, and monitoring park and forest recreation use. Recent work has focused on visitor management studies on public lands in Pennsylvania and in the National Forests of the northwest region of the United States.