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Using crowd-sourced data to inform nature-based recreation management: methods, applications, and implications
Citation:
Merrill, N., W. Tsai, AND A. Neale. Using crowd-sourced data to inform nature-based recreation management: methods, applications, and implications. Presented at The International Association for Society and Natural Resources (IASNR), NA, Virtual, June 20 - 24, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
This is an abstract for a conference session on the use of social media and human mobility data in estimating visitation to natural places. Counting visitation on the ground is time consuming and expensive. New passively collected datasets are opening up avenues to scale traditional methods to match larger geographic and temporal windows of interest to managers and researchers. This session gets a group of people working on these datasets and models together at the conference.
Description:
Nature-based recreation provides numerous benefits to society. Participation in nature-based recreation can lead to better health and well-being, increased social cohesion, and economic benefits to local communities. Understanding human use of outdoor recreation areas is critical and fundamental for managing recreation on public lands and unveiling the values of nature to society. However, compiling this information consistently across large spatial and temporal scales is often difficult due to logistical and financial constraints. New sources of crowd-sourced data from social media and commercially-available samples of aggregated and anonymized cellular device locations offer potential to inform estimates of visitation and visitor profiles across multiple spatial and temporal scales. The Office of Research and Development (ORD) at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is collaborating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. National Park Service to develop methods to estimate the values of nature-based recreation to communities and society via these new sources of data. ORD is piloting their research in two communities who were recipients of the Recreational Economy for Rural Community assistance program, a program jointly sponsored by the U.S. EPA Office of Community Revitalization, the US Forest Service, and the Northern Border Commission. This assistance program helps communities promote outdoor recreation as a pathway to community revitalization. This session will share our current state of knowledge on the usage of these new data sources for natural resource management, discuss the modeling approaches for data validation and prediction, explore the utility of these data, and address the challenges and concerns on the usage of social media and cell-phone derived data.
