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Abstract |
Bird watching, or avitourism, is both a highly popular form of nature-based tourism as well as a recreation activity undertaken by hundreds of thousands of people, including in Australia (Lopez et al., 2020; Steven et al., 2015). Many people engaging in bird watching do so in their local area, and as a result bird watching is a popular pastime in many urban parks and other green spaces in cities. These often smaller and fragmented spaces are (i) easy to access and popular places for people to visit regularly, and (ii) able to support relatively high levels of biodiversity in otherwise low diversity urban landscapes (Catterall et al., 2010). Monitoring where people engage with nature in cities including bird watching can be challenging due to the diversity of locations and multiple ways people access and traverse them. Surveys and other methods have been used to assess the popularity of bird watching and other activities in urban parks and more broadly (Pickering et al., 2020). Recently researchers have started to utilize citizen science and social media records of birds as a way to assess where people engage with nature including in cities (Lopez et al., 2020). Here we compare two sources of data – the popular citizen science app/website iNaturalist, and images posted to the social media platform Flickr to assess how such data could be used to understand where people are bird watching. We use the large subtropical city of Bris- bane, Australia as a case study as it contains high bird diversity, many urban parks, bird watching is popular (Catterall et al., 2010) and there are hundreds of geolocated records associated with images of birds available on the two platforms for the city. |
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