Science Inventory

Evaluating water quality impacts on visitation to coastal recreation areas using data derived from cell phone locations

Citation:

Furey, R., N. Merrill, J. Sawyer, K. Mulvaney, AND M. Mazzotta. Evaluating water quality impacts on visitation to coastal recreation areas using data derived from cell phone locations. PLOS ONE . Public Library of Science, San Francisco, CA, 17(4):e0263649, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263649

Impact/Purpose:

We describe a novel approach for evaluating the impacts of water quality on visitation to water recreation areas in New England with a focus on Cape Cod. To accomplish this, we estimate the effects of beach closures on human behavior using data derived from cell phone locations. As water recreation is increasingly recognized as a primary driver of economic activity for coastal communities, it is crucial to have accurate visitation estimates to assess the economic benefits and properly manage natural resources. We demonstrate the ability of cell data to accomplish this for the context of coastal recreation areas in New England.

Description:

Linking human behavior to environmental quality is critical for effective natural resource management. While it is commonly assumed that environmental conditions partially explain variation in visitation to coastal recreation areas across space and time, scarce and inconsistent visitation observations challenge our ability to reveal these connections. With the ubiquity of mobile phone usage, novel sources of digitally derived data are increasingly available at a massive scale. Applications of mobile phone locational data have been effective in research on urban-centric human mobility and transportation, but little work has been conducted on understanding behavioral patterns surrounding dynamic natural resources. We present an application of cell phone locational data to estimate the effects of beach closures, based on measured bacteria threshold exceedances, on visitation to coastal access points. Our results indicate that beach closures on Cape Cod, MA, USA have a significant negative effect on visitation at those beaches with closures, while closures at a sample of coastal access points elsewhere in New England have no detected impact on visitation. Our findings represent geographic mobility patterns for over 7 million unique coastal visits and suggest that closures resulted in approximately 1,800 (0.026%) displaced visits for Cape Cod during the summer season of 2017. We demonstrate the potential for human-mobility data derived from mobile phones to reveal the scale of use and behavior in response to changes in dynamic natural resources. Potential future applications of passively collected geocoded data to human-environmental systems are vast.