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Abstract |
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted park visitation around the globe. In an effort to understand the factors influencing these changes, numerous attempts have been made to use big data to monitor changes in park use (e.g., Venter et al., 2020). Googles Community Mobility Reports represent a dataset with significant potential in this regard. Released in April 2020, these reports were generated on the hypothesis that aggregated, anonymized data could be helpful [to] make critical decisions to combat COVID-19 (Fitzpatrick & DeSalvo, 2020, para. 1). The heading on the reports website asks browsers to see how your community is moving around differently due to COVID-19 (Google 2020b). The data released through the reports are generated from aggregated, anonymized sets of data from [Google] users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default (Google 2020b). |
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