With the arrival of summer, millions of vacationers are hitting the road or taking to the skies, bound for destinations both on and off the beaten path. And thanks to the ubiquity of phone cams, the mobile web and social media, many are sharing their travel photos online as they go. Now, Stanford researchers affiliated with the Natural Capital Project are showing that the metadata that accompanies such photos can be mined to yield insights into where people go and what draws them there.
Such data is crucial to the billion-dollar global tourism industry, especially as an indicator of the potential economic value of natural landscapes. But it can be time-consuming and costly to compile using traditional methods (e.g., headcounts at entrance gates or surveys from aerial photos). The Natural Capital Project, a partnership among Stanford, the Woods Institute for the Environment, the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, aims to quantify nature's benefit to society to help inform policy decisions.
"We are trying to determine ways to take better care of ecosystems," says Spencer Wood, a researcher with the Woods Institute and the Natural Capital Project who was the lead author of the study. "The core of the idea is to know the role ecosystems play in where people go to vacation and recreate."
The research team analyzed 1.4 million geo-tagged images uploaded to the photo-sharing site Flickr and compared the information with onsite surveys and headcounts at 836 recreational spots around the world. They determined that metadata such as longitude/latitude and time stamps provides a reliable, inexpensive source of information about where people are going for vacation and when. And the associated user profiles can indicate where the visitors are coming from.
"Flickr is especially valuable because it shows us where tourists like to go: places with ecosystems like seagrasses, beaches and coral reefs," Wood says. "This helps us plan where to build infrastructure to support tourism while minimizing the impacts to these ecosystems that the industry relies on."
Furthermore, says Anne Guerry, lead scientist with the Natural Capital Project and another of the study's authors, the data can be used to better understand how alterations to ecosystems or variability in access impact tourism. To that end, the researchers looked at how the number of visitors to three sites changed in response to events: the Occupy protests in Zuccotti Park, in New York City; the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert; and the fall foliage season in Vermont.
Guerry points to a hypothetical example of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In this scenario, photos crowdsourced from social media sites could help quantify how such a spill might impact tourism and the economy in the region. That information could then be used by planning authorities to guide decisions on oil and gas projects or other infrastructure and development.
Hugh Biggar, MA '04, is a writer based in Sacramento and the Bay Area.
