The seasonal and scale-dependent associations between vegetation quality and hiking activities as a recreation service

The Recreational Trail of the El Caminito del Rey Natural Tourist Attraction, Spain: Determination of Hikers’ Flow

“…Furthermore, these findings do allow for identifying the hours of maximum concentration according to zones throughout the day, which is very useful for management companies and administrators of the area. Based on this, it is possible to discover if the flow of entry and agglomeration (hiker accumulation) according to sectors is adequate, or a greater redistribution is needed to better monitor and experience the visit, which would guarantee the safety of the hiker, as well as better environmental preservation of the area visited [ 1 , 8 , 11 , 13 , 14 , 21 , 24 , 32 ].…”

“…This process of perception will provoke an affective state that is more or less positive, and which will be different for each hiker depending on the expectations or preferences [35,36]. Furthermore, each of the geographical characteristics of the natural landscape will have a different potential value and attractiveness, where certain aspects, such as the density or size of the trees or the presence of water, will have special relevance when catching the attention of the hiker [11,14,15,17,21,29,[34][35][36][37]. All of this is in agreement with the ideas postulated in the Attention Restoration Theory (ART).…”

“…This allows greater visibility and access to areas, natural parks, and/or mountain regions, which would otherwise not be available to the public. The access to remote natural areas that have great biodiversity or some type of feature in the landscape to be observed translates into an increase in the number of visits [ 9 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ]. This exponential growth of visitors to natural areas can provoke certain problems related to their efficient management and sustainable development [ 1 , 16 ], and can increase the importance of monitoring the hiker’s safety [ 5 , 8 , 15 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ].…”

Geodiversity Supports Cultural Ecosystem Services: an Assessment Using Social Media

“…Purely assessing photograph distribution does account for what the subject of the image is (Yan et al 2019). For example, people hiking in areas of high elevation may not be interested in topography, but instead they are in that location to take photographs of large-scale vegetation such as a forest (Aiba et al 2019). To reduce biases introduced by overactive users, following a method similar to the photo user days metric (Wood et al 2013), we grouped all the images a single user took on a single day as one.…”

Future scenarios for socio-ecological production landscape and seascape

“…Furthermore, under the PANCES project, several innovative methodological approaches were applied to assess natural capital and ecosystem services, both at the national scale and the local scale. For instance, to measure the mountain-driven cultural ecosystem services, Aiba et al (2018) investigate the associations between various landscape attributes and monthly hiking records of 1953 mountains in Japan, crowdsourced from a social networking service for hikers. Similarly, Kubo et al (2018) apply Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) to understand residents' anxieties about potential incidents caused by climate change in Amami islands, Japan through interviews and questionnaire survey.…”