US-IALE 2018

AUTHORS: Spencer Wood*, University of Washington; Dale Blanha, US Forest Service; Dave Fisher, Stanford University; Sarah Lange, US Forest Service; Emmi Lia, University of Washington; Dave Redman, Mike Schlafmann, Alex Weinberg, Eric White – US Forest Service

ABSTRACT: In order to provide relevant recreation opportunities for a changing population, public land managers need to know who is visiting public lands, when, and why. Surveys, permits, and trail counters provide valuable data on visitors, but these traditional methods are costly to implement and limited in their spatial and temporal coverage. To overcome this issue, we employ the wealth of data that is openly available through social media websites to better understand recreation behavior, preferences, and values across landscapes. In this talk we show how locations of geolocated photographs, tweets, and mobile phone records can be paired with traditional visitor data to model recreational use in US National Forests and predict how visitors will respond to changes in the natural and built environments. We describe how our team of scientists and practitioners -- from a diversity of disciplines -- analyze and evaluate various data sources, and discuss the benefits (and downfalls) of social media as data for understanding, anticipating, and responding to trends in recreational use.