Chasing Informed Decisions: A Research Note on the Potential for Strava to Support Rural Recreation Planning

With user-generated data from social media platforms becoming more widely available to researchers, these datasets may offer a valuable opportunity for recre-ation and tourism managers to enhance decision-making processes in their com-munities. The activity-tracking app Strava is one potentially underutilized data source in rural recreation planning. Strava data offer a useful supplementary tool that can be used in combination with traditional methods of data collection. We tested the usability of data provided by Strava Metro (a non-profit data service) to assess its capabilities with a case study of Kingdom Trails. We used trail counter data to assess the validity of Strava’s bike ride-counts on five trails. We also inte-grated traffic count data to determine peak times for both bike riders and vehicles where safety concerns may arise. The results of our assessment indicate that Strava data may provide additional insights into trail usage patterns, intensity variations, and visitor-use hotspots for a more holistic understanding of recreation at differ-ent spatial and temporal scales