To accompany the Economic Impacts of Outdoor Recreation in Arkansas report, we are releasing three sets of interactive data tools designed to help Arkansans better understand their outdoor economy—and uncover their own stories within it.

The first set highlighted state-level data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). This second set will highlight a regional outdoor employment dataset created through collaboration among the Arkansas Office of Outdoor Recreation, ARData, and Heartland Forward. The dataset is the first of its kind, created by using artificial intelligence to identify outdoor recreation businesses in state employment records. The regional data add another layer to our understanding of the Arkansas outdoor economy, providing insights into the role of outdoor recreation in each region.

Each interactive visualization below includes example use cases to guide exploration. These examples are meant to serve as starting points: the tools themselves contain hundreds of potential stories about Arkansas’s evolving outdoor economy.

Outdoor Employment Across Arkansas

Just as the Arkansas population is not equally spread across the state, outdoor employment varies by region.

The map below shows which regions are home to the most outdoor jobs. Thus, we see that Arkansas’s outdoor workers are generally concentrated in the northwest and central regions of the state. To see this more explicitly, we can change the metric to “Industry Employment as a Share of Total Statewide Outdoor Recreation Employment (%).” In doing so, we see that the Northwest area accounted for 30% of all Arkansas outdoor employment in 2024.

You may wonder how we define these regions. The areas displayed here are Arkansas’s ten Workforce Development Areas, which are clusters of related counties the state government uses to organize workforce development efforts. If the state of Arkansas were to cultivate new workforce development strategies to support outdoor recreation businesses, these are the regions we would use to coordinate those efforts. If you are unsure which workforce development area you live in, use the tool below to select your county and find out.

While the overall employment numbers are interesting, they generally align with the distribution of the population across the state. To understand how important outdoor recreation is to each region’s economy, we can change the metric to “Industry Employment as a Share of Total Employment in the Region (%).” When we make this change, we see that outdoor recreation accounts for the largest share of overall employment in the West Central area. As this area includes Hot Springs, Mt. Nebo State Park, and several more of the state’s major outdoor recreation assets, this is not particularly surprising. The Southwest area has the lowest share of employment corresponding to outdoor recreation. Thus, there may be opportunities to generate greater economic benefits from Millwood Lake, White Oak Lake, and the region’s other outdoor amenities.

If we want to understand the role an industry plays in each region’s outdoor economy, we can select a specific industry – let’s select Manufacturing – and change the metric to “Industry Employment as a Share of Total Outdoor Employment in the Region (%).” Once we’ve made those changes, we see that the Central area, home to the Lonoke Remington manufacturing plant, generates the largest share of outdoor employment from manufacturing – 36.9%. You may notice the Eastern area is missing from this map. There are multiple combinations of industry, region, and year for which there are two or fewer outdoor companies. When this is the case, we suppress employment data to protect the privacy of individual businesses.

Composition of Regional Outdoor Economies

While the map effectively highlights variations across the regions’ outdoor economies, it is not as effective for understanding the outdoor economy in a single workforce development area. To understand the industry make-up of each region, we can use the pie chart below. In the default settings, we see the shares of the statewide outdoor economy corresponding to the following industry groups:

• Arts, Entertainment, Recreation, Accommodation, and Food Services (AERAFS): This industry super-sector captures a large portion of outdoor tourism activity.
• Retail Trade: This sector captures spending at outdoor retail businesses, from bike shops to hunting outfitters. Activity in this sector is often a signal of local recreation participation.
• Manufacturing: This sector captures local manufacturing of outdoor products, from the Bass Cat boats made in Mountain Home to the Rebel lures made in Fort Smith.
• Other Industries: This captures employment at businesses in all industries not included in AERAFS, Retail Trade, or Manufacturing; note that when one of the individually listed sectors contains too few companies to report individually, that sector’s employment is included in Other Industries. The industry composition of this broad category varies from region to region, but the underlying sectors generally account for a smaller share of regional outdoor employment than those individually listed. To learn more about these other sectors, such as Wholesale Trade and Construction, use the map above.

We can use the Select a Region dropdown to explore the industry mix for each workforce development area. For example, we can select the Southeast Area, home to the Rice and Duck Capital of the World in Stuttgart and the boat manufacturing hub of Monticello. Upon selecting the area, we see that AERAFS accounted for 34.4% of outdoor jobs in 2024, but also that Manufacturing (29.8%) and Retail Trade (25.6%) are not far behind. We can use the year selector to understand how this mix has changed over time.

Outdoor Employment Trends

To round out our evaluations of regional outdoor economies, the line chart below lets users analyze trends in industry-level employment across time. Thus, we can identify drivers of overall outdoor economy growth as well as segments of the outdoor economy that may need support.

By default, the visualization displays statewide employment in Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation and Retail Trade. Note that we have removed seasonality, which smooths out seasonal variations in employment to more clearly display trends. To better understand the effect of seasonality, click on the Remove Seasonality? dropdown menu and select No.In doing so, you will notice that the Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation employmentpeaks in the warmer months and troughs in the colder ones. This is because our state is a popular summer tourism destination.

To explore employment trends in a specific region, let’s again remove seasonality, change the region to the Little Rock Area, and add Manufacturing. Once we have made those changes, we see that while manufacturing makes up a relatively small share of the area’s overall outdoor employment, it has been a major and stable growth driver since 2017 – a reflection of the success of companies like Aloha Pontoons.

Conclusion

While the examples above highlight a few use cases for these tools, users are encouraged to dig deeper, answer their own questions, and develop their own perspective of the Arkansas outdoor economy. The more we all know about the Arkansas outdoor economy, the better we can support it and appreciate its role in creating opportunities for Arkansas workers.