Using cellular device location data to estimate visitation to public lands: Comparing device location data to U.S. National Park Service’s visitor use statistics
We examined the use of commercially available cell data for estimating visitation to natural areas. We used the National Park Service’s (NPS) visitor use program as a ground-truth and example application of the scalability of visitation models based on cell data to many parks across the United States and in a variety of geographic and social settings. We found models based on the cell data product to be useful in estimating visitation, but the relationship between the cell data and official counts varied across parks and park types, limiting its use as a replacement for on-the-ground visitation quantification efforts. Instead, this new source of visitation data from cell phone locations should be applied to complement, improve and potentially enhance the scale of information collected by more traditional methods. In this paper, we discuss the potential as well as the limitations we found in application to the NPS visitor use program efforts as well as more generally for application to unmonitored natural areas.