Advancing Sustainable Development and Protected Area Management with Social Media-Based Tourism Data

Arkema, K.K. et al., Sustainability Tourism

Advancing Sustainable Development and Protected Area Management with Social Media-Based Tourism Data
Art Rachen on Unsplash

To foster tourism while protecting sensitive environments, coastal managers, tourism operators, and other decision-makers benefit from information about where tourists go and which aspects of the natural and built environment draw them to particular locations.

Yet this information is often lacking at management-relevant scales and in remote places. We tested and applied methods using social media as data on tourism in The Bahamas. We found that visitation, as measured by numbers of geolocated photographs, is well correlated with counts of visitors from entrance surveys for islands and parks.

Read the full study here



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