Exploring the Usage of Human Mobility Data for Understanding Visitation to Parks
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Parks in the United States not only preserve natural and cultural resources but also provide great opportunities for outdoor recreation and social cohesion. Understanding human use of parks and other protected areas is important to unveil the values provided to visitors and to local communities. Crowd-sourced data provide a new approach to quantify visitation and can provide information at finer temporal- and spatial-scales than surveys can. Many studies have demonstrated that social media data can be a reliable source to estimate park visitation. Yet, few studies have applied human mobility data derived from cell phone devices in this manner. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of using human mobility data for estimating visitation in National Parks. National parks were selected because they tend to have excellent visitation records calculated by other means. Fifty parks were selected based on their visitation ranks from 2018 and 2019 from the National Park Service (NPS) Stats data. We purchased daily resolution human mobility data after they were processed, anonymized, and aggregated for each park. Factors related to time (e.g., weekday, weekend, and holidays), temporal aggregation (e.g., seasonal, monthly), physical characteristics of locations (e.g., elevation), and climate (e.g., temperature, precipitation) are considered for modeling visitation estimates. Analyses included NPS Stats data across fifty parks at monthly resolution and trail counter data collected in summer from Yellowstone National Park sites at daily resolution. Preliminary results indicate that correlations between monthly summaries of cellphone derived and NPS Stats visitation vary greatly across parks, with an average correlation of 0.67. We will present the study and findings and will discuss future work cross-validating this approach with social media data. This abstract is approved by EPA but does not represent EPA policy.