within canada's publicly owned forests (i.e., crown forests), little information is available about how and when people use lakes and rivers for recreation. i report an example of using traffic monitoring to identify both the spatial and temporal patterns of water-based recreational trips for a set of lakes in northwestern ontario, canda. to gather recreational trip data, monitoring devices were strategically located along roads and trails that access lakes. i used information about the lakes, roads and trails and user days to help examine variations in spatial and temporal patterns of recreation demand. a fixed effects negative binomial regression model was used to estimate the effect of physical and temporal attributes on daily traffic counts at the water-based sites.