title: Spatial assessments of visitation and discourse about national parks using social media
Creators: name: Norman, Patrick
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: social media data
subject: spatial information
subject: movements of visitors
subject: parks

description: Protected areas such as national parks provide many cultural ecosystem services, including opportunities for tourism and recreation. Understanding patterns of visitation to national parks is important socially, environmentally and economically, as is public discourse about the parks. With the rapid increase in the use of social media there is an enormous volume of publicly available spatial data about national parks posted online, but what are the benefits and limitations of this still novel source of information for research and park management? Publicly available spatial data includes global positioning system (GPS) route data posted on social media platforms by mountain bikers, walkers and runners, as well as more general geographic information embedded in texts on microblogging platforms such as Twitter. This thesis examines how both of these types of spatial social media data can be used for monitoring visitation and discourse about national parks at a range of spatial scales from single parks to global assessments. Firstly, the thesis compared how walkers, runners and mountain bikers use a series of connected urban national parks and reserves close to the city of Brisbane, Australia, using GPS route data from the social media platform MapMyFitness (Chapter 2). Route data was correlated with trail counter data, indicating that it could be used as a surrogate for monitoring within and among parks, and may, in some cases, give more reliable data particularly for mountain biking. Clear differences were found in how the parks and reserves were used for the three activities with mountain bikers travelling further and using more of the parks than walkers and runners. Also, mountain bikers and walkers preferred to visit on weekends, while runners use the parks more consistently throughout the week. The results highlighted how route data complements and expands on other visitor data including providing important spatial and temporal data to assist in managing issues such as conflict and unauthorised use. Next GPS route data for walking and running was compared among different types of parks (urban to remote) and among social media platforms in south-east Queensland, Australia (Chapter 3). The amount of route data differed among the platforms MapMyFitness, GPSies and Wikiloc. Data from the fitness focused platform MapMyFitness was the most useful for visitor monitoring in the urban park, due to large number of routes posted. However, data from the platform only showed visitation on the formal trail network. In contrast, those posting routes for the remote park, particularly on Wikiloc, often went off the formal trail network. Therefore, the best social media platform to use for monitoring depends on the questions being asked and the type of park, with the popularity of platforms also varying among countries and over time. To see if social media platforms could be used to assess the relative popularity of parks for walking, running and mountain biking, GPS route data was collected from Strava, MapMyFitness and Wikiloc for 40 national parks in south-eastern Queensland, Australia (Chapter 4). Although Strava was very popular with over 430,000 routes, the other platforms provided useful information for a wider range of activities (MapMyFitness) or a different group of walkers (Wikiloc). Distance to urban areas, and to a lesser extent, the types of trails and permitted activities, best explained the popularity of parks based on data from the two fitness-oriented platforms, Strava and MapMyFitness. For Wikiloc, however, the elevation range of the park was the best predictor of popularity with more adventurous walkers wanting to access rugged and remote areas. Understanding what makes a park popular for each activity is important when managing social and environmental issues particularly in popular urban parks. For the last results chapter, the focus changed from GPS route data within a single park or region, to using text from the microblogging platform Twitter at a global scale (Chapter 5). Twitter data collected over a 6-month period was used to assess the scale of the discourse about national parks globally and to assess spatial information in the texts, including identifying which parks are talked about and by whom. The discourse was massive, in terms of number of tweets (&gt;2 million), number of tweeters (~750,000) and covered a wide range of parks, with 264 national parks talked about at least 100 times. The size of the discourse about parks varied among countries, but predominantly it was about North American parks, and often sent by accounts in the USA. The number of tweets was correlated with the relative popularity of parks with visitors for the 40 most talked about parks on Twitter, particularly for the most popular parks in the USA. Twitter is therefore a useful source of data for park management, particularly in countries where the platform is popular and/or there are globally renowned national parks. Overall, social media data including GPS routes, but also Twitter text, are an increasingly useful source of spatial information about parks including when assessing the movements of visitors in parks, factors influencing park popularity and what makes them noteworthy at a range of spatial scales from local urban parks to global networks. The individual results chapters, and overall results illustrated important benefits but also limitations with social media data including the range and scale of different data types as well as the ephemeral nature of social media platforms and the availability of data.