Reprint of: COVID-19 messaging in U.S. state parks: Extensions of the outdoor recreation strategies and practices framework unmasked by the pandemic.

Abstract

The temporal issue of COVID-19 as a stressor and the spatial nature of its impact across whole social landscapes implores park managers to pay special attention to the critical time in a potential visitor's visit-cycle: the planning and anticipation stages. It is here that effective messaging about the park's integration of expert authority data, detailed communication about park-level responses, and awareness of beyond-park contexts can help potential visitors decide how to safely recreate. This examination highlights the importance of pre-visit safety messaging and provides specific examples of how the outdoor recreation strategies and practices framework can assist park managers in targeting visitor use management communications and actions. Given this strategies and practices framework's usefulness to park managers and ubiquity across parks, we examine ways to expand it to consider broader and emergent contexts.