Estimating park visitation in Canadian national parks using volunteered geographic information (VGI)

Understanding human ecological impact in natural areas is important for ensuring overall environmental and human health. Managing the human ecological impact in protected areas like national parks can be laboursome and expensive with traditional visitation monitoring methods due to their size and complexity of use. Volunteered geographic information from digital platforms can provide researchers and park managers with unique insights into visitation that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to obtain. In this study, we test whether data collected from the photo-sharing and storage platform Flickr, the outdoor recreation tracking platform AllTrails, and the exercise tracking platform Strava, can be used to estimate official visitation data in Canadian national parks through simple and multiple linear regression. Our hypothesis is that these data sources can be used to estimate visitation patterns of outdoor recreation in Canadian national parks. We identified that all three sources of volunteered geographic data are significantly correlated with official visitation data obtained from Parks Canada. Our models were strengthened when the data sources were used together in a multiple regression rather than individually in bivariate models. This study demonstrates this relationship for the first time with the Strava Global Heatmap and AllTrails proxy data and creates a basis for using volunteered geographic information from different platforms to estimate visitation and patterns of outdoor recreation in Canadian national parks. Further, the ubiquitous spatial nature of these datasets suggests they may be used as a reliable proxy in other areas where official visitor counts are unavailable.