Multiple sources of volunteered geographic information strengthen holistic estimates of lake visitation.

ABSTRACT: Lakes provide human societies with a wide range of cultural ecosystem services (CES), yet these benefits are rarely quantified. Site visitation is frequently used to assign CES values to recreational destinations, but traditional approaches for estimating lake visitation have limited spatiotemporal extent. Visitation estimates increasingly leverage volunteered geographic information (VGI) to address this challenge. We compared the utility of five different sources of VGI from Flickr, eBird, iNaturalist, Twitter, and Gaia GPS, which broadly encompass lake users with different motivations for interacting with nature. We evaluated the potential for predicting on-site visitation from in-person counts by testing models informed by unique combinations of VGI sources at urban and suburban lakes i

SUBMITTER: Fricke RM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12863485 | biostudies-literature | 2026

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature