Using social media to discover unwanted behaviours displayed by visitors to nature parks: comparisons of nationally and privately owned parks in the Greater Kruger National Park, South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Managers of protected areas that are popular among tourists need to combine conservation goals with assurances of visitor safety while providing high-quality service. The compromise amongst these goals is reflected in the protected area regulations; however, monitoring of compliance with these regulations is costly and laborious. Social media present a new opportunity to observe visitor behaviour patterns in an unobtrusive and inexpensive manner. We propose a method of using online tourist photographs to monitor unwanted behaviours of the natural area visitors. The specific research object was the Greater Kruger National Park (GKNP) in South Africa, which is one of the largest game parks worldwide. We found that approximately 7% of the photographs depict instances of potentially unwanted behaviour. The results also indicate that the types of unwanted behaviours differ between the federally and privately owned parks, although the overall percentage of unwanted behaviours in the two types of parks is similar.