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Abstract |
Global positioning system (GPS) tracking has become a promising method for visitor monitoring in protected areas around the world. High-resolution data, including not only simple patterns of visitor movement but also walking speed and duration of stops, can be collected by distributing GPS receivers to individual visitors. This method, however, also has disadvantages, such as the high cost of distributing a large number of GPS receivers, risk of loss, and constraints on visitor movement for device distribution and collection. Our study focused on using the GPS equipped in many mobile phones today as an alternative tool. The use of mobile phone GPS functions could reduce the noted costs, risks, and constraints, because this method would use visitors’ own devices. Meijles et al. (2014) mentioned that the use of smartphone GPS functions could improve data acquisition, but to the best of our knowledge, no research has yet been published on the use of GPS in mobile phones and smartphones for visitor monitoring in a protected area. Our objective was therefore to test the feasibility of these uses of the technology. |
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