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Abstract |
Coastal areas are very popular worldwide, providing a range of important ecosystem services. Tourism and recreation are within those services, with beach tourism popular in a range of areas including the Mediterranean, east and west coast of the USA, Latin America and Australia. Assessing tourists to beaches including who visits, when and where and what they value is important for tourism and coastal managers, including to better allocate facilities and resources and for tourism campaigns. Traditional methods such as direct observations, track counters, and surveys have been used to gather such data, but with some limitations (Veal, 2018). In an attempt to complement traditional methods, metadata of posts on social media platforms have been increasingly used by researchers to assess visitation to natural areas (Ghermandi & Sinclair, 2019; Teles da Mota & Pickering, 2020), as it is often free and easy to use, and provide large amounts of user generated content. Beaches, although very popular for tourism, are only now being assessed using geolocated data from social media. This talk presents preliminary results of a comparison of temporal and spatial patterns of beach use at a regional scale, using Flickr images metadata. Specifically, it assesses: (1) who visits beaches, including locals, other nationals and international tourists, and (2) temporal and (3) spatial patterns of beach use along the whole 2,101 km coastline of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, including Sydney, the largest city in Australia with internationally renowned beaches including Bondi and Manly. |
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