Ski Resort Green Marketing in the Rocky Mountain West

In this dataset, we assess the prevalence of sustainability efforts of all major ski areas across the U.S. Rocky Mountain West (n = 83) and develop a quantitative metric for each ski area's sustainability marketing. We also include data for seven independent variables at all 83 resorts. Each resort's acreage and lift ticket price (on an off-peak Winter Saturday) was found on the resort's own website. We also found out whether each resort publicized the employment of a sustainability director or another similar position (any dedicated staff member for environmental/sustainability management or education was counted, no matter their title, such as "ecology specialist" or "environmental education manager"). A list of SSC member resorts is kept by the National Ski Areas Association, which we used to determine each resort's membership status. 2020 Election data, specifically the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost each resort's home county and state, comes from the MIT Election Data Lab (MIT Election Data and Science Lab, 2018). Climate projections for each resort, specifically the projected proportion of ski days lost by 2050 in an RCP 8.5 warming scenario, come from a recent analysis from the American Meteorological Society (Lackner et al, 2021). Previously published climate predictions were only available for 69 resorts out of the 83 examined in the study (Lacker et al, 2021). To generate values for the other resorts, we employed an imputation method, using a k-nearest-neighbors classification, where each resort was grouped with the 5 closest to it in a three-dimensional space with normalized axes of base elevation, summit elevation, and latitude. Then, the average climate prediction values between those 5 resorts were imputed to the missing value.