The Monitoring System developed in this study was designed to help manage the recreational forests by gathering data on visitors' profiles and their opinions about recreational use and related facilities. This data could identify for changing situations in forest recreation demand as well as providing information on planning the management and use of the forest areas in advance.
The standardized questionnaire had contained visitor profiles, activities, distribution of use by area, distribution us by time, duration of the visit, expenditure of visitors and information on visitor satisfaction and motivation. Also, the questionnaire had included the evaluations visitors' perception of facilities in order to identify the importance and performance of the various facilities, such as recreational and educational facilities, accomodations, directional signs as well as infrastructure.
The monitoring system was developed in the object-oriented programming (OOP) environment. Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 for the program language, Microsoft Access, and Excel program were used to develop the system. The monitoring system was composed of data input, database, and data analysis system. Once data were put into data input system, it automatically transferred to database, and it eventually produced the results of statistical analysis with one step procedure.
This study was integrated with facilities and visitor monitoring system to identify the visitor impact at the recreational forests. In addition, this monitoring system would provide necessary and useful background information for management on recreational use of natural resources in a practical manner.