Proactive Land Management: Making Work Visible and Valuable

Over the past six years, our founders have interviewed more than 400 land management agencies across the country. One challenge consistently rises to the top: reactive work.

These teams are not disorganized. They are quite the opposite; they are highly skilled, committed, and constantly in motion. Yet every day is dominated by urgent tasks like washed-out trails, clogged drainage, downed trees, and visitor incidents. When urgent work controls the calendar, other priorities quietly slip. Trails miss scheduled maintenance, small drainage issues escalate into major rebuilds, and master plan timelines stretch from quarters into years.

Reactive work creates a cycle that is hard to break:

• Reactive work consumes the week, pushing planned work aside.
• Bumped work accumulates into a backlog, which creates risk.
• The land looks “natural,” so stakeholders assume everything is functioning correctly.
• Budgets get trimmed, which only increases reactive work in the future.

This is not just a local problem. Public lands are central to American life. Over 50 percent of Americans recreate on them, and outdoor recreation contributes more than 4 percent of the U.S. GDP. Yet less than 0.25 percent of the federal budget funds the management of these lands.

The core issue is that when work is reactive and undocumented, the story gets lost. Teams cannot show the burden they carry compared to the value these lands provide. Without credible data, budget conversations become “please don’t cut us” instead of “here is the gap and here is the return.”

To break this cycle, agencies need to focus on three key strategies:

• Make the invisible visible. Capture existing work without slowing teams down. Recording tasks, time, materials, and photos builds an accurate picture of current demand. If tracking takes longer than completing the work, it will not happen. Field-first tools are essential.
• Connect work to outcomes. Link backlogged maintenance, damages, and visitor incidents to future costs. Show what remains undone because emergency tasks dominate daily priorities.
• Share the story. Clearly communicate the gap between what teams can accomplish today and the mountain of deferred work. Demonstrate the value the land provides to the community, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

This is the heart of why we built Outway. Our platform gives teams a fast, field-first way to manage work and automatically create evidence that can be shared with decision-makers. The principle is simple: measure what matters without adding extra time to already busy days.

Too often, teams on the front lines are heroic and invisible at the same time. By modernizing work, telling the story, and using data to guide decisions, land managers can move from reactive to proactive management. Teams deserve tools that help them show their impact, protect the land, and secure the resources needed to do it effectively.

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Contact us here to discover how Outway can help your land management team be more proactive.

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Cover photo by Juho Luomala on Unsplash