Abstract
Abstract Landscape characterisation using social media photographs from popular platforms has been proposed as a landscape and ecosystem services approach. However, popular crowdsourced websites provide uncharacterized data and are only representative of the general public. Photographs from crowdsourced sports platforms, whose users are more homogeneous, could help to characterise landscape more uniformly. In this study we use automated content analysis from photographs on Wikiloc, a crowd-sourced sports platform, to characterize landscape in the Ebro Delta Natural Park, a protected area in Spain. Our approach applies big data procedures and spatial analysis to provide in-depth information regarding what draws visitors’ attention to a landscape and to ascertain their intrasite flow. Our results show that sports users are keen on natural landscapes and pay less attention to rural and degraded landscapes, and that areas closer to paths are more photographed than more distant areas.
Highlights
Landscape characterisation can be defined as the way a landscape is described and understood through one’s senses, sight
Landscape characterisation using social media photographs from popular platforms has been proposed as a landscape and ecosystem services approach
Our results show that sports users are keen on natural landscapes and pay less attention to rural and degraded landscapes, and that areas closer to paths are more photographed than more distant areas
Summary
Landscape characterisation can be defined as the way a landscape is described and understood through one’s senses, sight. It is considered a prior step to landscape appraisal and is related to landscape recognition, character and value, etc. Numerous studies have used photographs as the main source of information for a landscape approach, especially landscape preferences [e.g. 7, 8, 17]. A photograph is understood to reveal what attracts the attention of the visitor to a site [18]. Whether related to aesthetics [19] or intimate feelings [17], the act of taking a photograph reveals that something in the landscape has caught the visitor’s eye [20, 21]. Studies using social media photographs as a big data source have proved useful in understanding and mapping ecosystem services [13, 22, 23] and opened the door to new sources of information for pinpointing what features and aspects of the landscape attract people’s in-
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