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Use of novel sources of visitation data at EPA
Citation:
Merrill, N., W. Tsai, AND A. Neale. Use of novel sources of visitation data at EPA. Novel Data in Recreation Monitoring, Fort Collins, CO, February 01 - 03, 2023.
Impact/Purpose:
Estimating visitation to parks and other natural lands is cirtical for understanding the benefits of improving environmental quality and for managing public resources. However, this basic information is missing for many places due to the logistics of on-the-ground visitation quantificaiton methods. This presentation covers work at EPA to use cellular device locational datasets to estimate visitation to parks and beaches, a tecnique that may be useful in augmenting high quality on-the-ground counts and create scalable visitation tools.
Description:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has conducted research in order to quantify visitation to parks and beaches through the use of cellular device locational datasets. This methodology may be beneficial in supplementing accurate on-site counts and developing large-scale visitation systems. Having this data is essential for evaluating the advantages of improving environmental quality and managing public resources. Unfortunately, this information is not available for many areas due to the difficulties of conventional visitation quantification methods.