Nathan Reigner is an applied social scientist who uses mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to inform planning and management for recreation and tourism to parks, protected areas, and natural and cultural heritage settings. His work is driven by the critical needs of resource and destination managers and focuses on providing them useful, scientifically-sound monitoring, assessment, evaluation, and synthesis. Reigner has served as the technical lead, project manager, or principal investigator for research studies and planning projects in more than 60 units of the US national park, national forest, national scenic trail, and national recreation area systems. Additionally, Reigner’s experience includes tourism and protected area management projects in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Island, Norway, Russia, Oman, and Ukraine.
In 2019 Reigner was a Fulbright Scholar hosted by the Icelandic Tourism Research and jointly funded by the Icelandic Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the US National Science Foundation. In 2018 he was a Sultan Qaboos Research Fellow. He is a member of the National Academies’ Transportation Research Board Standing Committee on the Transportation Needs of National Parks and Public Lands.
Reigner earned his masters in forestry from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 2008 and his Ph.D. in natural resources from the University of Vermont in 2014.