Using crowdsourced data to inform visitor management plans in Protected Areas

ROSSI, SEBASTIAN DARIO

Conferencia; Virtual Conference on Protected Area Tourism in a Post-COVID World; 2021

Universidad Estatal de Colorado

Managing protected areas effectively requires information about visitor?s use patterns, but these data are often limited. Social media images are a novel source of data to assess how people use, view and value the environment. We explore how geotagged photos on Flickr, a popular photo-sharing social media site, can generate hotspots maps and distribution models of temporal and spatial patterns of use in two mountain protected areas of high conservation value: Mt. Aconcagua in Argentina and Mt. Kosciuszko in Australia. Access to these images is often free, the volume and spread of images is expanding rapidly and hence they are an increasingly valuable source of data complementing and expanding on other data. Results demonstrate the usefulness of social media data alone as well as a complement for visitor monitoring, providing spatial and temporal information for site-specific and park-level management of visitors and potential impacts in conservation areas.Furthermore, we explore the use of social media images, including for remote environments, analysing the content of images posted to Flickr by people visiting a provincial park that contains the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere, Mt. Aconcagua, in Argentina, South America. The saliency of aesthetic landscapes, recreation, social relations and fresh-water provisioning was high across the 334 images posted to Flickr by 104 visitors to the Park, but location mattered. Images from visitors in easily accessible day-use areas were significantly more likely to include content that reflects biodiversity-existence, geology, culture and education services, while the content of images from remote areas was more likely to reflect social relations and fresh-water provision services. Comparisons of the content of images from Mt. Aconcagua with other studies in Europe, South America, Asia, Africa and Australia highlight similarities and differences in people?s views of the diversity of locations, but also the benefits and limitations of user-generated social media content when assessing environmental and management issues.