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Published on: June 19, 2019
Using social media to quantify nature-based tourism and recreation
Spencer A Wood1, Anne D Guerry, Jessica M Silver
11] Natural Capital Project, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA [2] Natural Capital Project, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
Online social media photos, like those from flickr, can reliably estimate nature recreation visitation rates. This "big data" approach offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional surveys for understanding global travel patterns.
Area of Science:
- Ecology
- Conservation Science
- Tourism Studies
Background:
- Traditional methods for studying nature recreation, such as entrance surveys, are costly and offer limited data.
- Online social media platforms provide a new, large-scale data source for ecological and recreational research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate the utility of social media
Main Methods:
- Utilized geotagged photographs from flickr to estimate visitation rates at 836 global recreational sites.
- Analyzed photographer profile data to determine traveler origins.
- Compared social media-derived visitation estimates with empirical data.
Main Results:
- Crowd-sourced social media data serve as a reliable proxy for empirical visitation rates.
- The method accurately estimated visitation at diverse recreational locations worldwide.
Conclusions:
- Social media data offer a scalable and cost-effective approach to monitor nature-based recreation.
- This big data methodology can reveal factors attracting visitors and predict impacts of ecosystem changes on visitation.
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