Assessing the potential of social media for estimating recreational use of urban and peri-urban forests

How to cite this study

Wartmann, F.M., Baer, M.F., Hegetschweiler, K.T., Fischer, C., Hunziker, M. and Purves, R.S. 2021. Assessing the potential of social media for estimating recreational use of urban and peri-urban forests. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 64(2021),127261.

Overview

This study analyzes data from Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram to assess visitation at 10 urban and peri-urban Swiss National Forest Inventory sites and evaluates recreational models on a national scale. Social media text was analyzed and a Flickr-based model and Twitter-based model were compared with a pre-existing potential recreation demand (PRD) model to estimate recreational use. Both the Flickr and Twitter models correlated with the existing PRD model; the Instagram model was not evaluated due to data limitations.

Relevance

This study is relevant to researchers interested in using social media data to estimate visitation. A limitation of this study is that most social media posts were referenced in nearby urban areas or at forest edges, and fewer in specifically forested areas, especially on smaller mapping scales. This suggests that social media data may not be well-suited for informing specific management in smaller forest recreation areas due to limited data availability.

Location

Study sites were located across Switzerland.

Trail Type

The 10 study sites (1.4 km x 1.4 km) from the Swiss National Forest Inventory (NFI) had different forest compositions, including mixed forest, deciduous forest, and coniferous forest, and were either urban, peri-urban, or rural. All sites showed a high recreational use potential, according to the potential recreational demand (PRD) model used by the Swiss NFI.

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential of social media data for assessing recreation in urban and peri-urban forests in Switzerland. The research for this paper was financially supported by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN).

Findings

• Though the sample sizes from the three social media platforms are different, the datasets are all significantly correlated. There was a higher concentration of social media data around urban centers and attractive places for tourists, while less popular alpine locations had consistently less data across all platforms. 
• In the three sites analyzed for Instagram text data, the top three terms describing landscape elements, qualities, or activities were: Zurich Uetliberg – “winter,” “snow,” “cars”; Neuchâtel – “beautiful,” “nature,” “lake”; and Locarno – “autumn,” “lake,” “view.”
• Models based on Flickr and Twitter data correlated with the existing PRD model. Instagram data was excluded from this analysis since the researchers were unable to collect data at the national scale. 
• The recreation model based on Flickr determined recreational use to be higher in areas with lower population densities and lower in areas with high touristic infrastructure compared to the PRD model. This revealed that the Flickr model provided a better estimate of actual use in areas where census data is low but many people still visit. 
• Calibrating the Flickr and Twitter models and PRD model for forested cells only (rather than all of Switzerland) resulted in a slightly stronger correlation between the two models for estimates of recreation use. This is likely because forest plots do not contain residential areas, which typically have high counts of social media data and therefore higher discrepancies between social media data counts and potential recreation demand.