Measuring recreational visitation at U.S. National Parks with crowd-sourced photographs

Sessions, Carrie; Wood, Spencer A.; Rabotyagov, Sergey S.; Fisher, David M.

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2016.09.018

Cited by 165 publications

(112 citation statements)

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“…We also present a set of three negative binomial regression models to illustrate factors associated with AADTT and assess whether these same factors are correlated with photo-user days and Twitter-user days. Negative binomial regression is especially useful when the dependent variable is a non-negative integer such as a count, and these models have been used widely to model traffic counts and volumes (e.g., Sessions et al, 2016). Our base model is the model of AADTT previously presented by Wang et al (2016).…”

Section: Analysis and Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Researchers have shown that social media can be used to gauge demand at remote parks and other destination recreation facilities (Keeler et al, 2015;Sessions, Wood, Rabotyagov, & Fisher, 2016). Urban trails are interesting facilities and present additional challenges for monitoring because they are open-access, have multiple formal and informal access points, are integrated with other transportation and recreation infrastructure, and are used for both recreation and utilitarian purposes such as commuting or shopping.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Photos, tweets, and trails: Are social media proxies for urban trail use?

Wood

Fisher

et al. 2017

JTLU

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Decision makers need information on the use of, and demand for, public recreation and transportation facilities. Innovations in monitoring technologies and diffusion of social media enable new approaches to estimation of demand. We assess the feasibility of using geo-tagged photographs uploaded to the image-sharing website Flickr and tweets from Twitter as proxy measures for urban trail use. We summarize geo-tagged Flickr uploads and tweets along 80 one-mile segments of the multiuse trail network in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and correlate results with previously published estimates of annual average daily trail traffic derived from infrared trail monitors. Although heat maps of Flickr images and tweets show some similarities with maps of variation in trail traffic, the correlation between photographs and trail traffic is moderately weak (0.43), and there is no meaningful statistical correlation between tweets and trail traffic. Use of a simple log-log bivariate regression to estimate trail traffic from photographs results in relatively high error. The predictor variables included in published demand models for the same trails explain roughly the same amount of variation in photo-derived use, but some of the neighborhood socio-demographic and built-environment independent variables have different effects. Taken together, these findings show that both Flickr images and tweets have limitations as proxies for demand for urban trails, and that neither can be used to develop valid, reliable estimates of trail use. These results differ from previously published results that indicate social media may be useful in assessing relative demand for recreational destinations. This difference may be because urban trails are used for multiple purposes, including routine commuting and shopping, and that trail users are less inclined to use social media on trips for these purposes.

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Section: Analysis and Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Photos, tweets, and trails: Are social media proxies for urban trail use?

Wood

Fisher

et al. 2017

JTLU

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“…We developed a proxy for visitation rates to protected areas using publicly available geotagged photographs (Wood et al 2013, Sessions et al 2016. We used data stored on the Flickr photo-sharing website (www.flickr.com): freely available data that has previously been used as a source of information on human preferences over space and time (Wood et al 2013, Keeler et al 2015.…”

Section: Protected Area Visitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Social media offers high-resolution spatial data on visitation patterns across broad geographic extents, and it can also be used to infer the socioeconomic characteristics of visitors and visitor preferences (Keeler et al 2015, Sessions et al 2016, van Zanten et al 2016). For example, geotagged photographs (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…images with spatial coordinate metadata) can provide insights into preferences for particular landscape attributes (Casalegno et al 2013, Martínez Pastur et al 2015, Richards and Friess 2015, Willemen et al 2015. Social media data are thus a potential source of information to deliver cost-effective assessments of nature visitation benefits over regional areas (Wood et al 2013, Keeler et al 2015, Richards and Friess 2015, Sessions et al 2016. While previous research has revealed spatial patterns of cultural ecosystem service use (Paracchini et al 2014, van Zanten et al 2016, the distribution of benefits among different communities is still to be assessed using these data.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Planning for the conservation and management of ecosystem services in Central Chile

Martínez‐Harms¹

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The ecosystem services concept emphasizes the benefits societies obtain from ecosystems.These benefits include the production of food and clean water, the regulation of floods, provision for recreation and scenic beauty, a connection to place, and inspiration. Ecosystem services have become popular within both scientific and policy circles as a means to document the value humans place on ecosystems, evaluating these benefits from nature and using the resulting knowledge to inform landuse management decisions. The integration of ecosystem services into decision-making, nevertheless, remains challenging. The research that comprises this thesis provides a comprehensive framework for strengthening the dialogue between ecosystem services assessment and decision-making. My case studies focus on critical challenges in the translation and transformation of ecosystem services as a concept, to a component that improves environmental decision-making.Numerous assessments have quantified, mapped, and valued ecosystem services. However, much of the literature fails to clarify how the information gathered in such assessments can be used to inform decisions that will affect ecosystem services. I propose a framework for making decisions for ecosystem services adapted from decision science and synthesize the degree to which the peerreviewed ecosystem services literature has captured these steps. I find that the ecosystem services literature has not covered all the steps of a formal decision-making process. For the ecosystem service paradigm to gain traction in science and policy arenas, future ecosystem service assessments should have clearly articulated objectives and meet user-related measures for ecosystem services, seek to evaluate the consequences of scenario alternatives, and facilitate closer engagement between scientists and stakeholders.There is a paucity of studies of ecosystem services assessments under global change, particularly in the developing countries of Latin America. I demonstrate a rapid assessment of the impacts of global change on key ecosystem services in the data-sparse region of Central Chile. This approach translates expert-derived qualitative scenario storylines into quantitative spatial predictions of the combined effects of climate change, urbanization and fire events on the future provision of carbon storage, wine production, and scenic beauty for the year 2050. I find that the cumulative impacts of climate change and urbanization are likely to place considerable pressure on ecosystem services in Central Chile by mid-century revealing the need for stronger planning regulations to manage land-use change.In environmental decision-making, there is increasing attention towards equity of access to ecosystem services, and in conservation implementation. In central Chile, distribution of ecosystem 2 services must be considered within the context of substantial economic and social inequity. I develop a user-related measure to assess the accessibility of the population to the protected area network. ...

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Data‐driven predictions of summertime visits to lakes across 17 US states

et al. 2023

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Using a dataset of more than 51,000 US lakes, we estimated the relationship between summertime lake visits, lake water clarity, landscape features, and other amenities, where visits were estimated with counts of geo-located photographs. Given the size and complexity of our dataset, we used a combination of machine learning techniques, imputation techniques, and a Poisson count model to estimate these relationships. We found that every additional meter of average summertime Secchi depth was associated with at least 7% more summertime lake visits, all else equal. Second, we found that lake amenities, such as beaches, boat launches, and public toilets, were more powerful predictors of visits than water clarity. Third, we found that visits to a lake were strongly influenced by the lake's accessibility and its distance to nearby lakes and the amenities the nearby lakes offered. Our research highlights the need for (1) a better understanding of how representative social media data are of actual recreational behavior, (2) the development of best practices to account for nonrandom patterns in missing natural feature data, and (3) a better understanding of the potential endogeneity in the lake visit-water quality relationships.

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Measuring recreational visitation at U.S. National Parks with crowd-sourced photographs

Cited by 165 publications

References 13 publications

Photos, tweets, and trails: Are social media proxies for urban trail use?

Photos, tweets, and trails: Are social media proxies for urban trail use?

Planning for the conservation and management of ecosystem services in Central Chile

Data‐driven predictions of summertime visits to lakes across 17 US states

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