OpenStreetMap used in protected area management. The example of the recreational infrastructure in Berchtesgaden National Park

Abstract

The availability of spatial data is a key concern in protected area management, including visitor management. Obtaining spatial data is often laborious and expensive. New approaches involving the general public in data collection can provide a solution. Among existing crowdsourcing initiatives, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the largest. But, while public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS), volunteered geographic information (VGI), and user-generated content (UGC) are used in visitor management, OSM still receives less attention. In this paper, questions regarding the possibilities of using OSM data in visitor management are discussed. The focus is on recreational infrastructure data, since infrastructure is an important means for guiding and managing visitors. The Berchtesgaden National Park (Germany) served as the study area. A list of the relevant elements of the recreational infrastructure in the protected area was elaborated, and an analysis was carried out to determine how useful the OSM tagging system is for describing these elements. In addition, data held in the OSM database was assessed first with regard to which infrastructure elements the OSM database holds data for, and second for the amount of data held. Along with the benefits, there are also challenges in using OSM. Thus, there is a need to expand the OSM tagging system to allow the description of different types of nature-based recreational infrastructure and to increase people's involvement in OSM.Research eco.mont -Volume 9, Number 2,

Mitigating the Pressures: The Role of Participatory Planning in Protected Area Management

“…These refer to (i) the time and costs required (Luyet et al 2012), (ii) potential stakeholder frustration and fatigue (Rasheed and Abdulla 2020;Reed 2008), (iii) the issue of power dynamics and group thinking (Luyet et al 2012), (iv) communication problems such as technical language and general language barriers (Glicken 2000;Rasheed and Abdulla 2020), (v) potential new conflicts (Kangas and Store 2003), (vi) involvement of non-representative stakeholders (Reed 2008) or additional empowerment of those already important (Luyet et al 2012;Rashid et al 2013) and (vii) data generation and retrieval (Costa et al 2018). In terms of the data issue, a key challenge for effective PA management and, in particular, visitor management, is the availability of spatial data (Hennig 2017). Combined with other factors, these pitfalls undermine the quality of PP processes and diminish the quality of their outcomes.…”

Using VGI and Social Media Data to Understand Urban Green Space: A Narrative Literature Review

“…To improve data quality, OSM and authoritative data should be combined to develop an integrated open data source [25]. Levin et al [89] presented a semantic analysis to improve data classification, enhancing data quality to overcome cross-cultural and multi-language problems.…”

“…VGI is defined as user-generated digital geographical data, including both text and multimedia [21], enabled through the use of a range of technologies to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic information. VGI can be used to support the understanding and exploration of the socio-economic and environmental conditions of a place through the analysis of different resources such as geotagged Tweets and photos [22,23], check-in data [24], OpenStreetMap [25], etc. The widespread use of popular social media technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flickr where users post and share their views, opinions, feelings and emotions provides a resource to examine UGS visits, behaviours and use [26].…”

An approach for establishing correspondence between OpenStreetMap and reference datasets for land use and land cover mapping

“…It is also noteworthy that OSM data are freely available to everyone. Due to the above advantages, OSM data have been used in various applications such as three‐dimensional (3D) modeling (Goetz, ; Over, Schilling, Neubauer, & Zipf, ), population mapping (Bakillah, Liang, Mobasheri, Arsanjani, & Zipf, ), protected area management (Hennig, ), route planning (Wang & Niu, ), and urban energy modeling (Schiefelbein et al, ).…”