Using social media images to assess ecosystem services in a remote protected area in the Argentinean Andes

Abstract

Social media images are a novel source of data to assess how people view and value the environment. Access to these images is often free, the volume and spread of images is expanding rapidly and hence they are an increasingly valuable source of data complementing and expanding on other data. Recently, coding images has been used to assess sociocultural values relating to ecosystem services including those provided by national parks. To further explore the use of social media images, including for remote environments, we analysed the content of images posted to Flickr by people visiting a national park that contains the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere, Mt. Aconcagua, in Argentina, South America. The saliency of aesthetic landscapes, recreation, social relations and fresh-water provisioning was high across the 334 images posted to Flickr by 104 visitors to the Park, but location mattered. Images from visitors in easily accessible day-use areas were significantly more likely to include content that reflects biodiversityexistence, geology, culture and education services, while the content of images from remote areas was more likely to reflect social relations and fresh-water provision services. Comparisons of the content of images from Mt. Aconcagua with other studies in Europe, South America, Asia, Africa and Australia highlight similarities and differences in people's views of the diversity of locations, but also the benefits and limitations of user-generated social media content when assessing environmental and management issues.

Exploring public values through Twitter data associated with urban parks pre- and post- COVID-19

“…The specificity of information that can be elicited from qualitative content of social media depends on what and how the content is analyzed. Multiple studies have used images posted on photo-sharing social media platforms (e.g., Flickr and Instagram) to investigate parks and landscape experiences ( Callau, Albert, Rota, & Giné, 2019 ; P. Chang and Olafsson, 2022 , Conti and Lexhagen, 2020 ), preferred features ( Pickering, Walden-Schreiner, Barros, & Rossi, 2020 ), and perceived ecosystem services ( Alieva et al, 2021 , Fox et al, 2021 , Gosal and Ziv, 2020 , Rossi et al, 2020 , Yoshimura and Hiura, 2017 ). Although the approach can reveal certain places and features that are valued by visitors, photo-sharing social media is limited in further information about specific subjective values ( Schrammeijer, van Zanten, & Verburg, 2021 ).…”

“…The real-time and geotagging features of social media data enable investigation of changes in perceptions and values associated with urban parks over time (e.g., seasons) ( Pickering et al, 2020 ) and across different parks ( Rossi et al, 2020 , Wang et al, 2021 ) based on the semantics extracted from the content of text data. A few studies have investigated changes in recreational ecosystem services provided by parks before and during the COVID-19 pandemic using social media data based on keywords or hashtags extracted from social media posts.…”

Harnessing artificial intelligence technology and social media data to support Cultural Ecosystem Service assessments

“…This method also allows researchers and practitioners to check whether hotspots of CES consumption overlap with the presence of species threatened by human activity. Moreover, identifying hotspots and coldspots of CES flow can guide the management of high tourist numbers, the development of new infrastructure or the identification of conservation intervention areas (Hausmann et al, 2018(Hausmann et al, , 2020Rossi et al, 2019).…”

Data Science for Geoscience: Recent Progress and Future Trends from the Perspective of a Data Life Cycle

“…The community collaboration on OpenStreetMap greatly helped the rescue work after the 2010 Earthquake at Haiti (Ahmouda et al, 2015). The images on Flickr were used for ecosystem assessment in remote areas (Rossi et al, 2019). Besides the public social media, another type of crowd-sourcing platform focuses on a certain subject and is normally maintained by a community of enthusiasts.…”