Department of Environmental Sciences and Studies, Franklin University Switzerland, Sorengo, Switzerland.
Environ Manage. 2018 Sep;62(3):446-457. doi: 10.1007/s00267-018-1056-z. Epub 2018 May 7.
With tourism increasing in remote regions, it is important to be able to estimate potential environmental impacts from the tourists in order to plan and manage natural areas. This study combines measures of ecological sensitivity with data from publicly available geotagged photographs posted on the social media site Flickr to assess the vulnerability of the locations frequented by foreign tourists in the Westfjords region of Iceland between 2014 and 2016. The results suggest that tourists cluster primarily around six hotspots that represented some of the major known tourist destinations of the region. Although tourists generally frequented areas with lower ecological sensitivity and rarely went far beyond the main roads, one of the hotspots was in an area of higher ecological sensitivity. Further, tourists also appeared to have higher intensity stays when they entered areas of higher ecological sensitivity. Overall, these findings highlight the usefulness of combining data from social media in assessing potential environmental impacts of tourism. However, natural resource managers should be aware of limitations in the use of such data.
随着偏远地区旅游业的增长，能够估计游客对环境的潜在影响对于规划和管理自然区域非常重要。本研究将生态敏感性测量与来自社交媒体网站 Flickr 上公开的地理标记照片数据相结合，以评估 2014 年至 2016 年间冰岛西部峡湾地区外国游客光顾的地点的脆弱性。结果表明，游客主要集中在六个热点地区，这些地区代表了该地区一些主要的知名旅游目的地。尽管游客通常光顾生态敏感性较低的地区，很少超出主要道路，但其中一个热点地区位于生态敏感性较高的地区。此外，当游客进入生态敏感性较高的地区时，他们的停留时间似乎也更长。总的来说，这些发现强调了在评估旅游对环境的潜在影响时结合社交媒体数据的有用性。然而，自然资源管理者应该意识到使用此类数据的局限性。
