Weather & Summer Spatial Behavior of U.S. National Park Visitors (Flickr data 2006

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
Maps-for-each-study-unit-showing-spatial-distributions			05/09/2020 12:13:PM
Misc-datasets			04/30/2020 03:13:PM
R-code-for-data-analysis			01/20/2021 04:23:PM
R-code-for-data-collection-and-processing			01/20/2021 04:22:PM
Visitation-correlations-between-Flickr-and-NPS-data			04/30/2020 02:43:PM
all_ecoregions_Flickr.csv	text/csv	167.6 MB	01/26/2021 01:09:PM

Project Citation:

Wilkins, Emily J., and Smith, Jordan W. Weather & Summer Spatial Behavior of U.S. National Park Visitors (Flickr data 2006 - 2018). Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2021-01-26. https://doi.org/10.3886/E119191V2

Project Description

Summary: This dataset corresponds to the following paper: Wilkins, E. J., Howe, P. D., & Smith, J. W. (2021). Social media data reveal ecoregional variation in how weather influences visitor behavior in U.S. National Park Service Units. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82145-z

In this paper, we investigate how daily temperature and precipitation in the summer influence visitors' spatial behavior in 110 U.S. National Park Service Units. We use Flickr data from 2006 - 2018 to uncover visitors locations within parks, and connect each geotagged point to the weather at the date the photo was taken (using Daymet data), as well as nearby infrastructure and environmental features (using OpenStreetMap data).

While we cannot provide the raw Flickr data due to privacy concerns, we include the final database we used after all data collection, cleaning, and processing (all_ecoregions_Flickr.csv). All personally identifiable information is deleted from this database. This database was used to run the statistical tests presented in the paper, as well as generate the maps (R code included).

We also include maps of each of the 110 study sites that show the general summer spatial distributions of Flickr posts in each park, and well as how the spatial distributions differ by hot and cold summer days.

Funding Sources: National Science Foundation (1633756); Utah State University Office of Research; Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism at Utah State University

Scope of Project

Geographic Coverage: 110 U.S. National Park Service Units

Time Period(s): 2006 – 2018 (Data only from May - September)

Collection Date(s): 12/2019 – 12/2019

Universe: Any visitor to 110 U.S. National Park Service Units who has uploaded a photo to Flickr.

Data Type(s): geographic information system (GIS) data; images: photographs, drawings, graphical representations; program source code

Collection Notes: All data was collected by writing Python and R scripts to interact with APIs.

Methodology

Sampling:

We collected all Flickr data within the study sites, and filtered the dataset to only include one post per user, per day, within a 10 meter radius.

Data Source:

Flickr (2006 - 2018)
Daymet daily weather data (2006 - 2018; used R package daymetr)
OpenStreetMap (downloaded December 2019; used R package osmdata)
USGS Point Elevation Query Service (1/3 arc-sec resolution; used R package elevatr)

Collection Mode(s): web scraping

Unit(s) of Observation: Individuals

Related Publications

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Published Versions

V2 [2021-01-26]

V1 [2020-05-09]

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Weather & Summer Spatial Behavior of U.S. National Park Visitors (Flickr data 2006 - 2018)