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Using ‘Big Data’ to Better Understand Coastal Access: An Environmental Equity and Justice Perspective
Citation:
Merrill, N., K. Mulvaney, M. Mazzotta, AND J. Twichell. Using ‘Big Data’ to Better Understand Coastal Access: An Environmental Equity and Justice Perspective. NOAA presentation: Using ‘Big Data’ to Better Understand Coastal Access: An Environmental Equity and Justice Perspective, Narragansett, RI, June 02, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
The presentation will cover the use of human mobility datasets to understand coastal recreation. The project will cover work to ground-truth commercial cellphone locational datasets for use in recreation and tourism analsyis of natural lands.
Description:
Using big data, in this case cell phone location records, can assist agencies in better understanding how the ‘public’ uses the beach and avails itself of coastal access opportunities. When linked with other environmental data sets and known coastal access amenities, this novel source of coastal access visitation can provide not only the origin (and destination) of beach users, but also can offer insights into the opportunities, barriers and constraints to communities not historically well-represented in current beach user survey information. Our project hopes to confirm the utility and gaps that this type of big data may fill in and to develop new ways to both visualize and understand the data, its limitations, and its potential to inform decision-making. We are currently in the data management and preparation phase and will be undertaking a range of analyses to see what this data can reveal about coastal access at our study sites in California. BEACON has collaborated with a broad group of public agencies, including importantly EPA staff (who proved this concept useful for the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program-story map), to combine resources and staff to systematically organize and analyze the data. We hope that this sharing of sources, methods, and data products allows the results to be disseminated to a wide decision-making and interested stakeholder community.