Understanding changes in park visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic: A spatial application of big data

Rice, William L.; Pan, Bing

doi:10.1016/j.wss.2021.100037

Cited by 77 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 69 publications

(99 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…One option would be to further explore the role of multi-level values on green space visitation (building on van Riper et al, 2019). Another option would be to integrate individual, organizational, and interpersonal/relational factors in models of green space visitation in addition to environmental factors such as proximity of leisure facilities, road connectivity, population density, seasonal changes, altitude and traffic speed (see (Liu H. et al, 2017) for overview; Rice and Pan, 2021). Also, it would be worthwhile repeating this same study by exploring a range of different leisure activities, recognizing that park visitation is influenced by leisure motivation (Kabisch et al, 2021).…”

Section: Implications For Ugi Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coping With Crisis: Green Space Use in Helsinki Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Korpilo

Kajosaari

Rinne

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Cities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged a deeper exploration about how people deal with crisis. This paper presents one of the first pre- and during-pandemic assessments of urban green infrastructure (UGI) use across the same individuals with the aim of better understanding how people's use of different types of urban green and blue spaces changed during the pandemic. A baseline Public Participation GIS survey (N = 1,583 respondents) conducted in August 2018 was followed up in May 2020 (N = 418 identical respondents) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Helsinki, Finland. We found that residents were more likely to visit UGI closer to their home during the pandemic compared with before the pandemic. Patterns of use of UGI were associated with the quality of residential green areas, for example, people sought out forests nearby one's domicile and tended to avoid parks and recreation areas in order to escape the pressures of lockdown, socially distance and avoid overcrowding. However, spatial cluster analyses also revealed that the places mapped by intensive users of natural recreational areas and more outdoor oriented users became more dispersed during the pandemic, suggesting their active search for new types of UGI, including use of agricultural land and residential areas with high tree density cover. Our results further highlighted that some types of UGI such as more distant natural and semi-natural areas and blue spaces serve as critical infrastructure both before and during the pandemic. Natural and semi-natural areas experienced very little change in use. The presented results have implications for how planners design and manage green spaces to enable residents to cope with crises like pandemics into the future.

show abstract

Section: Implications For Ugi Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coping With Crisis: Green Space Use in Helsinki Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Korpilo

Kajosaari

Rinne

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Cities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Nature contact estimates from "big data" datasets (e.g., Google mobility, Strava, Geotagged Instagram images) did not provide precise definitions of 'natural environments', may have counted multiple visits by the same individuals and might not be representative of the larger population due to inability to obtain data from individuals who are not either using the apps or sharing their location information. All the big data studies identified in this review revealed considerable increases in nature contact (Lu et al, 2021b;Rice and Pan, 2021;Venter et al, 2020), whereas smaller datasets (e.g., survey data) utilized by studies in this review reported mixed findings regarding nature contact during the lockdown (Grima et al, 2020;Heo et al, 2021;Ugolini et al, 2021). Rice and Pan (2021) emphasized the need to validate big data inferred changes in nature visitation.…”

Section: Opportunities For Nature Exposurementioning

confidence: 87%

“…All the big data studies identified in this review revealed considerable increases in nature contact (Lu et al, 2021b;Rice and Pan, 2021;Venter et al, 2020), whereas smaller datasets (e.g., survey data) utilized by studies in this review reported mixed findings regarding nature contact during the lockdown (Grima et al, 2020;Heo et al, 2021;Ugolini et al, 2021). Rice and Pan (2021) emphasized the need to validate big data inferred changes in nature visitation. They further argued that changes in visits to the natural environment might be influenced by the difficulty and comfort with being outside as a result of the topographic setting of the study site and its seasonal climate conditions rather than the COVID lockdown alone.…”

Section: Opportunities For Nature Exposurementioning

confidence: 87%

“…The variations in visit frequency and time spent in nature might also be, to some extent, attributed to how data were collected and other environmental factors such as climate and elevation (Rice & Pan, 2021). Nature contact estimates from "big data" datasets (e.g., Google mobility, Strava, Geotagged Instagram images) did not provide precise definitions of 'natural environments', may have counted multiple visits by the same individuals and might not be representative of the larger population due to inability to obtain data from individuals who are not either using the apps or sharing their location information.…”

Section: Opportunities For Nature Exposurementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Nature’s contributions in coping with a pandemic in the 21st century: A narrative review of evidence during COVID-19

Labib¹,

Browning²,

Rigolon³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While COVID-19 lockdowns have slowed coronavirus transmission, such structural measures also have unintended consequences on mental and physical health. Growing evidence shows that exposure to the natural environment (e.g., blue-green spaces) can improve human health and wellbeing. In this narrative review, we synthesized the evidence about nature’s contributions to health and wellbeing during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that during lockdowns, people experienced multiple types of nature, including both outdoors and indoors. Frequency of visits to outdoor natural areas (i.e., public parks) depended on lockdown severity and socio-cultural contexts. Other forms of nature exposure, such as spending time in private gardens and viewing outdoor greenery from windows, may have increased. The majority of the evidence suggests nature exposure during lockdowns was associated with less depression, anxiety, stress, and more happiness and life satisfaction. Additionally, nature exposure was correlated with less physical inactivity and fewer sleep disturbances. Evidence was mixed regarding associations between nature exposure and COVID-related health outcomes, while nature visits might be associated with greater rates of COVID-19 transmission and mortality when proper social distancing measures were not maintained. Findings on whether nature exposure during lockdowns helped ameliorate health inequities by, for example, impacting the health of lower-socioeconomic populations more than their higher-socioeconomic counterparts, were mixed. Based on these findings, we argue that nature exposure may have buffered the negative mental and behavioral impacts of lockdowns during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recovery and resilience during the current and future public health crises might be improved with nature-based solutions, interventions, designs, and governance.

show abstract

“…As a result, obtaining up-to-date information about how people use and visit natural areas by traditional means may be laborious, time-consuming, and costly [15]. Further, some aspects of park visitation are inherently spatial and thus require analyses that incorporate spatial components [16], something that traditional methods may fail to do in a timely or effective manner, especially during a pandemic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Mobile Device Data to Track the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Spatiotemporal Patterns of National Park Visitation

Kupfer

Ning

et al. 2021

Sustainability

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Effective quantification of visitation is important for understanding many impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on national parks and other protected areas. In this study, we mapped and analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of visitation for six national parks in the western U.S., taking advantage of large mobility records sampled from mobile devices and released by SafeGraph as part of their Social Distancing Metric dataset. Based on comparisons with visitation statistics released by the U.S. National Park Service, our results confirmed that mobility records from digital devices can effectively capture park visitation patterns but with much finer spatiotemporal granularity. In general, triggers of visitation changes corresponded well with the parks’ management responses to COVID-19, with all six parks showing dramatic decreases in the number of visitors (compared to 2019) beginning in March 2020 and continuing through April and May. As restrictions were eased to promote access to the parks and the benefits associated with outdoor recreation, visitation in 2020 approached or even passed that from 2019 by late summer or early autumn at most of the parks. The results also revealed that parks initially saw the greatest increases in visitation after reopening originating from nearby states, with visitorship coming from a broader range of states as time passed. Our study highlights the capability of mobility data for providing spatiotemporally explicit knowledge of place visitation.

show abstract

Understanding changes in park visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic: A spatial application of big data

Cited by 77 publications

References 69 publications

Coping With Crisis: Green Space Use in Helsinki Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Coping With Crisis: Green Space Use in Helsinki Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Nature’s contributions in coping with a pandemic in the 21st century: A narrative review of evidence during COVID-19

Using Mobile Device Data to Track the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Spatiotemporal Patterns of National Park Visitation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About