Geotagged data from social media in visitor monitoring of protected areas; a scoping review

ABSTRACT

The present study undertakes a scoping literature review on the use of geotagged data in protected areas’ tourism research. We contribute to the literature by providing a detailed exploration of visitor monitoring's main aspects that can be extracted from geotagged data. The revised studies presented various methodological approaches to obtain meaningful information from geotagged data. Their findings outlined new data sources’ potential to assess visitor behaviour and provide visitors’ use indicators. Further, the data nature makes it possible to analyse visitors’ spatial and social behaviour. The literature review allows us to draw conclusions about geotagged data's validity as indicators of visitors in Protected Areas and the benefits and limitations of using such data in research.

KEYWORDS:

• Geotagged data
• social media
• protected areas
• visitor monitoring
• scoping review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 InVEST recreation module database; http://data.naturalcapitalproject.org/nightly-build/invest-users-guide/html/recreation.html

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Regional Development Fund: [Grant No: RTI2018-098402-B-I00]; Spanish Research Agency of the Ministry of Science and Innovation: [Grant No: RTI2018-098402-B-I00].