A national model for estimating United States public land visitation.

ABSTRACT: Public land management relies on accurate visitor counts in order to understand and mitigate environmental impacts and to quantify the value of ecosystem services provided by natural areas. We build and test predictive visitation models suitable for publicly-managed parks, open space, and other protected lands based on multiple sources of digital mobility data including geotagged posts to social media platforms, community science observations, and a mobile device location dataset from a commercial vendor. Using observational visitation data series from the United States' National Park Service, Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service, we quantify the accuracy of statistical models to predict on-the-ground visitation using individual and combined sources of mobility data alongside othe

SUBMITTER: Merrill NH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12663154 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature