A novel approach to evaluating water quality impacts on visitation to coastal recreation areas on Cape Cod using data derived from cell phone locations.

Abstract

Linking human behavior to environmental quality is critical for effective natural resource management. While it is commonly assumed that environmental conditions partially explain variation in visitation to coastal recreation areas across space and time, scarce and inconsistent visitation observations challenge our ability to reveal these variations. With the ubiquity of mobile phone usage, novel sources of digitally derived data are increasingly available at a massive scale. Applications of mobile phone locational data have been effective in research on urban-centric human mobility and transportation, but little work has been conducted on understanding behavioral patterns surrounding dynamic natural resources. We present an application of cell-phone locational data to estimate the effects of beach closures on visitation to coastal access points. Our results indicate that beach closures on Cape Cod, MA, USA have a significant negative correlation to visitation at those beaches with closures, while closures at a sample of coastal access points elsewhere in New England have no detected impact on visitation. Our findings represent geographic mobility patterns for over 7 million unique coastal visits and suggest that closures resulted in approximately 1,800 (0.026%) displaced visits for Cape Cod during the summer season of 2017. We demonstrate the potential for human-mobility data derived from mobile phones to reveal the scale of use and behavior in response to changes in dynamic natural resources. Future applications of passively collected geocoded data to human-environmental systems are vast.

Using cellular device location data to estimate visitation to public lands: Comparing device location data to U.S. National Park Service’s visitor use statistics

“…Similar observations were found in later studies for a nature reserve in California [39] and for beaches in New England [40]. Cell data also have been applied to estimate change in recreation to coastal areas in response to changes in environmental conditions, such as bacterial-induced beach closures [41]. Like many other sources of big data (e.g., vehicle GPS, metro card, bank card), cell data can not only help understand human mobility patterns but also social, cultural, and economic values for better land management and city development [42,43].…”