Assessing the validity of mobile device data for estimating visitor demographics and visitation patterns in Yellowstone National Park

COVID-19’s impact on visitation behavior to US national parks from communities of color: evidence from mobile phone data

“…The validation of SafeGraph's mobile-phone dataset in its application to national parks has been previously validated by Yun et al 17 . Specifically, Yun et al's 17 work showed a close resemblance between the NPS visitor use survey and SafeGraph's mobile-phone dataset in terms of visitation counts, temporal visitation patterns, racial demographics, and state-level residential origins of the visitors to Yellowstone National Park. However, SafeGraph's POI classification of "National Parks" remains inconsistent with the NPS's official definition of National Park.…”

“…( 1234567890) 47 . While SafeGraph does provide its own classification of "national parks", its classification methodology remains inconsistent with the NPS's official definition and formal list of "national parks" 17,49 . Hence, we extracted POIs that fall within the encompassed polygon shapefiles of each respective national park.…”

“…We then selected the POI with the highest average monthly visitation records for each distinct national park. The choice to select the POI with the highest visitation record could be attributed to the fact that a brief analysis reveals that in many parks, the top 5 most populated POIs tends to fall within the same vicinity 17 . Specifically, the top 5 most populated POIs for many large national parks, like Cuyahoga National Park, Indiana Dunes National park, and Yellowstone National Park, typically encompass the areas surrounding the park entrances 17 .…”

“…The choice to select the POI with the highest visitation record could be attributed to the fact that a brief analysis reveals that in many parks, the top 5 most populated POIs tends to fall within the same vicinity 17 . Specifically, the top 5 most populated POIs for many large national parks, like Cuyahoga National Park, Indiana Dunes National park, and Yellowstone National Park, typically encompass the areas surrounding the park entrances 17 . This remains rational since visitors would have to pass through park entrances to enter the parks and gain access other areas of the park.…”

“…Despite the perceived utility provided by mobile phone location data, minimal research on park visitation with this type of data 14,17 has been published, in large part due to the relatively recent development of this data collection method 18 . Two exceptions are studies of park visitors in Orange County, California (U.S.) 14 and Yellowstone National Park 17 . In both studies, the authors found demographics gathered through mobile phone location data to be relatively consistent with those reported through surveys 14 .…”