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Abstract |
As exemplified by the recent review articles by Ghermandi and Sinclair (2019) and Teles de la Mota and Pickering (2020), social media as data source for environmental sciences, nature-based tourism and visitor monitoring is a highly dynamic field. However, what is missing despite many promising results are validations of the results of social media analyses against those obtained with “traditional” onsite visitor monitoring approaches. Therefore, we compare in this contribution social media data (Sinclair et al. 2020a,b) and onsite survey results (e.g. Job et al. 2016) in nearly all German national parks with respect to visitor provenance, visitor type (local, day-tripper, vacationists) and recreational value of national park visits (consumer surplus). Furthermore, we estimate visitation numbers based on social media data for protected areas without systematic visitor counting and provide information about the spatio-temporal visitor behavior in the protected areas. |
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