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Abstract |
Nature-based tourism is popular including to many national parks globally (Balmford et al. 2015). To conserve these natural areas and their biodiversity, while facilitating appropriate tourism, it is important to monitor visitors including when they visit, where they go and what they value. Well established monitoring methods including surveys, direct observations, interviews, track counters, ticket sales, permits, indirect observations (e.g., cameras, satellite images) as well as newer methods such as GIS tracking and Public Participatory GIS. In the last few years, social media has started to be used to monitor visitation including in protected areas. One of the most common data sources examined so far is geolocated images posted to the photo sharing platform Flickr (Teles da Mota and Pickering 2020). However, there is very limited research assessing if there is Flickr data available and if it would be useful for parks in developing countries where nature-based tourism is important, economically, socially, and environmentally but resources for monitoring are limited, such as in Nepal. Here we test how social media could be used to monitor visitation in parks in countries such as Nepal. We analyzed images about Chitwan National Park posted to Flickr, including assessing: 1) when do people visit the Park and how similar are the patterns to ground visitor data, 2) where do people go and how does this vary seasonally and 3) what do people value in the Park. |
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