A retrospective analysis of injury cases for visitor risk management in a nature-based touristic destination

Outdoors organization is necessary in order to learn from prior experiences so as to create a proactive visitor risk management approach. Using retrospective analysis, this paper presents the epidemiology of visitor injuries at a forest recreation area in Taiwan. This article estimates that the injury rates occurred by weather and topographical factors using Poisson and negative binomial (NB) regression models, because the data characteristics in the current study are discrete and non-negative values. Weather variables, such as average temperature, relative humidity, and rain condition, have a positive relationship with visitor injury rate, which model selection criteria and goodness−of−fit showed to be the best fit for the NB model. The effects of topographic factors, namely average elevation and average slope of injury locations, are insignificant for visitor injury rate. Our finding confirms injury rates in nature are associated with weather, especially the appearance of rain. Each of these offers empirical evidence for future injury prevention programmes and for the proper perception of injury risk.