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Using data derived from cellular phone locations to estimate visitation to natural areas: An application to water recreation in New England, USA
Citation:
Merrill, N., S. Atkinson, K. Mulvaney, M. Mazzotta, AND J. Bousquin. Using data derived from cellular phone locations to estimate visitation to natural areas: An application to water recreation in New England, USA. PLOS ONE . Public Library of Science, San Francisco, CA, 15(4):e0231863, (2020). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231863
Impact/Purpose:
It is hard to quantify visitation to natural areas over many places and many time-frames. We test the use of commercially-available data derived from cell phone location information for estimating visitation to coastal recreation areas. We find that the data, with a calibration to on-the-ground counts, can be useful for estimating daily visitation across a variety of sizes of sites. The high-resolution information in space and time provided by the data expands opportunities for developing next-generation models of humans’ interaction with the natural environment. In addition, the data provides the ability to know not just how many people are visiting specific locations, but also where visitors are coming from. This information allows for a deeper understanding of the community composition of people who visited an area and their value for that place.
Description:
We introduce and validate the use of commercially available human mobility datasets based on cell phone locations to estimate visitation to natural areas. By combining this data with on-the-ground observations of visitation to water recreation areas in New England, we fit a model to estimate daily visitation for four months to more than 500 sites. The results show the potential for this new big data source of human mobility to overcome limitations in traditional methods of estimating visitation and to provide consistent information at policy-relevant scales. However, the data providers’ opaque and rapidly developing methods for processing locational information required a calibration and validation against data collected by traditional means to confidently reproduce the desired estimates of visitation. We found that with this calibration, the high-resolution information in both space and time provided by cell phone location-derived data creates opportunities for developing next-generation models of human interactions with the natural environment.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Using data derived from cellular phone locations to estimate visitation to natural areas: An application to water recreation in New England, USA