Abstract
Abstract. Green areas such as natural parks provide citizens with a number of health and leisure benefits, often accessible with a few minutes of travel from urban centres. Moreover, the natural heritage enclosed in most green areas plays a pivotal role also in the economic integrity of these territories by driving local growth thanks to the establishment of tourism activities. In this context, the monitoring of both visitors and dwellers fluxes, as well as destination preferences, is key to provide land managers with critical information to shape local management and promotion strategies. This paper presents a preliminary investigation on the use of citizen-generated geodata -provided by Facebook- to empower the generation of space- and time-resolved insights into people fluxes in natural parks through a comparison with neighbouring urbanized areas. The Insubria region, a historical-geographical area between Northern Italy and Southern Switzerland, is considered a case study. Facebook users’ population and movements data are analysed to identify trends and metrics on fluxes and support the estimation of the recreational and tourism value of natural parks. Results are presented as graphs and summary statistics and discussed according to their possible integration into territorial management and promotional practices.
Highlights
Green areas located within or nearby heavily urbanized territories provides countless benefits to communities including leisure, health and psychological supports to citizens who have access to them (Markevych et al, 2017)
Where green areas include natural parks or valuable natural heritage, local economic growth is likely to occur thanks to ventures connected to outdoor activities and tourism, which in turn is key for generating political support for green areas area (Di Minin et al, 2015)
The study focuses on the Insubria region, a historical-geographical area that stretches between Northern Italy and Southern Switzerland, where the potential of tourism in the green areas is not fully exploited
Summary
Green areas located within or nearby heavily urbanized territories provides countless benefits to communities including leisure, health and psychological supports to citizens who have access to them (Markevych et al, 2017). This study preliminary investigates applications of citizen-generated geodata, namely records of users’ population and movements provided by Facebook (Facebook, 2021), as a complementary data source for the monitoring of natural parks. The study focuses on the Insubria region (see Figure 1), a historical-geographical area that stretches between Northern Italy and Southern Switzerland, where the potential of tourism in the green areas is not fully exploited. This because of the fragmented political and management context of the area that extends across different local and national jurisdictions.
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