Find the one you like! Profiling Swiss parks with user generated content

Abstract

The establishment of national parks originated from the desire to preserve scenic landscape areas of national or regional importance. With more recent diversification of protected area types and goals, obtaining knowledge on how parks are recreationally used has become more challenging for (local) policy makers and park managements, as there is a general lack of systematic and publicly available visitor monitoring data. We analyze recreational park use for 20 Swiss parks of national importance and develop park profiles, using user-generated content from Flickr. The 20 Swiss parks are described by 111,437 unique images taken by 6,468 unique users between 2007 and 2020. We fill an existing research gap by defining park use across three dimensions space, time and users, and combining these in our analyses. The park profiles provide information on diversity of recreational use and serve as a starting point for analyzing how the three dimensions contribute to this diversity. Our results show diverging park uses for the three dimensions indicating that park location matters, especially in terms of peri-urbanity and geographic region. Our method can be translated into European scale analyses, provided that different languages are considered. Park profiles are easy to communicate and easy to interpret tools for (local) policy-makers and park managers to segment the tourism market and develop new park marketing strategies to e.g. streamline visitation flows and reduce the negative impacts of outdoor recreation. In broader terms, our study serves as input for future recreation policy to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of protected areas

Management implications
• We offer insights into recreational park use in terms of users, space and time, particularly valuable for parks where monitoring visitation is vital (i.e. protected areas).

• Park profiles provide easy to communicate and interpret extensible tools for (local) policy-makers and park managers.

• Park profiles can be used for among others the development of new park marketing strategies catering preferences for differentiated user groups.

• Since different recreational user groups differ in their recreational behavior and in turn their environmental impact, park profiles can help in streamlining visitors as a potentially effective management measure for increased park sustainability (e.g. biodiversity conservation).