The Official Website of the State of Arkansas
To accompany the Economic Impacts of Outdoor Recreation in Arkansas report, we are releasing three sets of interactive data stories designed to help Arkansans better understand their outdoor economy—and uncover their own stories within it.
The first two stories focused on the economic impacts of the outdoor economy. This story explores hunting and fishing license purchases to uncover insights for these two key recreation activities. We explore both resident and non-resident purchases to understand not only how Arkansans’ preferences have changed over time, but also which of our world-class opportunities attract hunters and fishers from other states.
Each interactive visualization below includes example use cases to guide exploration. These examples are meant to serve as starting points: the visualizations themselves contain hundreds of potential stories about Arkansas’s evolving outdoor economy.
Each generation has different preferences around how it spends time outside. These differences drive trends in overall popularity of each outdoor recreation activity, hunting and fishing included.
The line chart below allows us to explore hunting and fishing license purchases by age group; for added insights, we can break each age group into males and females. This interactive tool initially displays the shares of four resident sub-populations who purchased either a Hunting or Fishing License each year: all female residents, all male residents, female residents ages 18-24, and male residents ages 18-24.
These data highlight a very important trend: While young male Arkansans have historically hunted and fished at much lower rates than the overall population, that gap has closed substantially in recent years. By hovering over the lines, we see that 30.2% of the overall male population purchased a hunting or fishing license in the 2024 season, compared to 27.4% of those ages 18 to 24.[i]
A question worth asking: Are all forms of hunting and fishing less popular among the youngest age cohort in our data? Let’s change some settings to find out. In particular, let’s change Gender to All, select the Age Groups 18-24 and 55-64, and change License Type to Duck Stamp. Note: Age group options only cover ages 18 to 64 because this analysis focuses on adults and because Arkansans over 64 have access to special, lower-cost licenses.[ii]
Once these changes are made, we see that duck hunting is a pursuit of the youngest Arkansans, with 3.7% of the youngest cohort purchasing duck stamps in 2024, compared to 1.6% of the oldest cohort.
While the line chart above is useful for exploring changes in hunting and fishing activity across time, we can use the comparative bar chart below to better understand how resident participation varies across age group and gender.
Initially, the bar chart displays Duck stamp purchase rates for the 2024 season, demonstrating the additional insights we can gain from the bar chart in comparison to the line chart. In particular, we now see that duck stamp purchase rates trend down with age for both male and female residents.
How does this compare to overall hunting rates? Let’s change License Type to Hunting License to find out. Once we make that change, we see that the share of each female age group purchasing a license generally trends down with age. However, that’s not the case for males, with a general upward trend that peaks for the 45-54 group. These nuanced differences suggest the value of targeted strategies to grow participation, as preferences vary across activities and demographic groups.
Central to the economic impact of outdoor recreation in Arkansas is hunting and fishing tourism. By exploring license sales by type, we can understand opportunities to grow that impact. The interactive map below supports that exploration by allowing users to display the number of individuals in each state purchasing Arkansas hunting and fishing licenses of any type, as well as trout and duck stamps specifically.
By default, the map displays the Number of Hunting License Holders from each state in 2024. Not surprisingly, the states closest to Arkansas are generally the states purchasing the most non-resident hunting licenses. However, it is somewhat surprising that Georgians and South Carolinians each purchase more Arkansas hunting licenses than Oklahomans.
To understand why this might be the case, let’s change License Type to Duck Stamps and change Metric Type to Share of All License Holders in the State. Now we can see 78.1% of Georgia residents and 86.1% of South Carolina residents who bought any form of Arkansas license in 2024 also purchased a duck stamp. Thus, the elevated license sales to those states are driven by Arkansas’ world-class duck hunting opportunities. Meanwhile, the lower overall hunting license sales to Oklahomans and Kansans may reflect the fact that those states also offer great duck hunting opportunities.
One option to grow the economic impact of hunting and fishing tourism is to convince those coming to Arkansas to duck hunt to stay a few more days and go fishing. To understand the size of this opportunity, let’s change License Type to Fishing License. Once we have made this change, we can see that very few of those coming from Georgia and South Carolina to duck hunt are also fishing in Arkansas; only 10.8% of South Carolinians who purchased any form of Arkansas license in 2024 purchased a fishing license. Therefore, there is a clear opportunity for Arkansas bass and trout fishing guides to appeal to duck hunters from these states.
The examples above highlight only a few of the insights these tools can surface. We encourage hunters, fishers, and policymakers to explore the data to understand trends in hunting and fishing. We also encourage entrepreneurs to use these tools to identify business opportunities that will grow the impact of hunting and fishing, creating new jobs for their fellow Arkansans.
[i] The 2024 season extended from July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024. All other seasons follow the same pattern.
[ii] One reason for limiting our analysis to adults is that individuals under the age of 16 are not required to purchase a license.