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Abstract |
The mobility restrictions related to COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in the biggest disruption to individual mobilities in modern times. The crisis is clearly spatial in nature, and examining the geographical aspect is important in understanding the broad implications of the pandemic (Oliver et al. 2020). Visitations to national parks or other natural areas have experienced a tremendous change during the pandemic. In some areas, like in Finland, visitors seeking for experiences or less crowded places have crowded national parks. This has caused a need for national park managers to add services to the parks. In other places attracting high numbers of international tourists, like Madagascar, the visitor numbers have dropped drastically leading to problems of local livelihoods and even pressure to use land for alternative purposes like food production (Eklund et al. 2020).To understand these changes and their impact, there is a need to monitor how and where people use natural areas. Mobile big data (data collected by mobile phone operators or various apps) has been considered valuable for conservation already for some time (Di Minin et al. 2015; Tenkanen et al. 2017; Toivonen et al. 2019). The pandemic has highlighted the high potential of mobile big data even further (Poom et al. 2020). Mobile Big Data makes it possible to study the spatial effects of the crisis with spatiotemporal detail at the national and global scales. The data is being collected continuously, allowing monitoring change over time. The importance has not been left unnoticed: Some companies, like Google and Apple, have shared previously inaccessible information about peoples mobility patterns openly online, allowing, for a limited time period, new analyses also about visits to nature. |
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