Spatial assessments of visitation and discourse about national parks using social media

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 su
Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School of Environment and Sc
Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology
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