Using social media to understand the impact of weather on skiing and snowboarding in Utah

National Outdoor Recreation Conference | Burlington, VT | April 23, 2018

SOCIAL MEDIA USE

79%32% 31%

29% 24%Greenwood et al. (2016)

SOCIAL MEDIA DATAAnalysis types

• Text-based• Photo-based• Geotagged spatial

• Tweets to understand how people frame climate change1

• Photos from Instagram and Flickr at a national park to understand visitor preferences2

• Geotags to track visitation3

1 Jang & Hart (2015) 2 Hausmann et al. (2017) 3 Wood et al. (2013)

SOCIAL MEDIA DATATracking visitation

• Flickr is useful for estimating visitation and home location at 836 tourism sites globally1

• Flickr shows temporal trends in US national park visitation2

• Flickr data shows a strong relationship with survey data for visitation to Iowa lakes3

• Instagram/Twitter/Flickr data are highly associated with monthly park visitation in Finland and South Africa4

1 Wood et al. (2013) 2 Sessions et al. (2016) 3 Keeler et al. (2015) 4 Tenkanen et al. (2017)

OBJECTIVES1. Examine the feasibility and uses of geotagged

Twitter data for outdoor recreation management2. Investigate how Twitter post volume at Utah ski

areas changes due to snow conditions

STUDY SITE Solitude, Brighton, Alta, & Snowbird

DATA COLLECTION: TWITTER• Rest API or streaming API• All tweets within resort boundaries• Tweet text

• Date/time• Geotag (coordinates)• Number of followers• Number of retweets• Home location• User name• User profile description

PLATFORM DIFFERENCESPLATFORM ACCESSABILITY TIME FRAME DATA SCALETwitter Live streaming,

7 days pastPresent + 7 days past 500 million tweets

per day, 1% availableInstagram Live streaming

(ending 12/11/2018)Present 95 million

photos/videos a dayFacebook None NA NA

Flickr Open access 2005 - Present 5 billion photos

Panoramio Open accessNo longer exists

2005-2016 94 million photos

Twitter, Inc. (2018); Instagram (2018); Flickr (2018); Kaiser (2018)

TEMPORAL SCALES

n = 594PUD = 325

n = 223PUD = 196

TWITTER DATA

NOAA (2018)

3/18/18 – 4/7/18

Snow data in inches

SPATIAL SCALES

n = 594PUD = 325

n = 3,344PUD = 1,417

MANAGEMENT IMPLICATIONSCommunicateTrack Visitation #Preferences

DOWNLOADING DATA

• Easily collect Twitter or Instagram data• Up to 100 posts every hour• Hashtag or location (5 km radius) • Saves to a csv file• Up to 5 datasets

Gruzd (2016)

#HASHTAG DATA COLLECTION

LOCATION DATA COLLECTION• Create locations• Search social media for location tag• Instagram locations taken from Facebook

COMMUNICATION TOOL

Wilkins, Smith, & Keane (in review)

Emily J. WilkinsJordan W. Smith

Contact : emily.wilkins@aggiemail.usu.edu: @WilkinsScience

REFERENCESFlickr. (2018). The Flickr Developer Guide. Available from https://www.flickr.com/services/developer

Greenwood, S., Perrin, A., & Duggan, M. (2016). Social media update 2016. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.

Gruzd, A. (2016). Netlytic: Software for Automated Text and Social Network Analysis. Available at http://Netlytic.org

Hausmann, A., Toivonen, T., Slotow, R., Tenkanen, H., Moilanen, A., Heikinheimo, V., & Di Minin, E. (2017). Social Media Data Can Be Used to Understand Tourists’ Preferences for Nature-Based Experiences in Protected Areas. Conservation Letters.

Instagram (2018). Instagram API Overview. Available from https://www.instagram.com/developer.

Jang, S. M., & Hart, P.S. (2015). Polarized frames on “climate change” and “global warming” across countries and states: Evidence from Twitter big data. Global Environmental Change, 32, 11-17.

Kaiser. (2018). Panorank – Global stats. Available from www.panorank.com/index.php?lang=en&op=global

Keeler, B.L., Wood, S. A., Polasky, S., Kling, C., Filstrup, C.T., Downing, J.A. (2015). Recreational demand for clean water: evidence from geotaggedphotographs by visitors to lakes. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 13(2), 76-81.

NOAA (2018). National Centers for Environmental Information: Climate Data Online. Available at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/customoptions

Sessions, C., Wood, S. A., Rabotyagov, S., & Fisher, D. M. (2016). Measuring recreational visitation at U.S. National Parks with crowd-sourced photographs. Journal of Environmental Management, 183, 703-711. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2016.09.018

Tenkanen, H., Di Minin, E., Heikinheimo, V., Hausmann, A., Herbst, M., Kajala, L., & Toivonen, T. (2017). Instagram, Flickr, or Twitter: Assessing the usability of social media data for visitor monitoring in protected areas. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 17615

Twitter, Inc. (2018). Getting started. Available from https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/getting-started

Wilkins, E. J., Smith, J. W., & Keane, R. (in review). Social media communication preferences of national park visitors. Manuscript submitted to Applied Environmental Education & Communication.

Wood, S. A., Guerry, A. D., Silver, J. M., & Lacayo, M. (2013). Using social media to quantify nature-based tourism and recreation. Scientific reports, 3, 2976. doi:10.1038/srep02976