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Using cellular device location data to estimate visitation to public lands: Comparing device location data to U.S. National Park Service's visitor use… — Europe PMC PMID:37943842

Source: Europe PMC (en)
Original: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/37943842
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289922
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-07T11:59:15.230Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 03c8683e2d529578821001a5c5f7cccd4d37f5fa19191dd161d80374bbc7d1b8
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_11f9c442900a

How to cite

Using cellular device location data to estimate visitation to public lands: Comparing device location data to U.S. National Park Service's visitor use… — Europe PMC PMID:37943842 — Europe PMC (en), https://europepmc.org/article/MED/37943842 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_11f9c442900a (Metraipolis archive dc_11f9c442900a, sha256 03c8683e2d529578821001a5c5f7cccd4d37f5fa19191dd161d80374bbc7d1b8)

BibTeX

@misc{dc11f9c442900a,
  title = {Using cellular device location data to estimate visitation to public lands: Comparing device location data to U.S. National Park Service's visitor use… — Europe PMC PMID:37943842},
  howpublished = {Europe PMC (en)},
  url = {https://europepmc.org/article/MED/37943842},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_11f9c442900a; sha256 03c8683e2d529578821001a5c5f7cccd4d37f5fa19191dd161d80374bbc7d1b8},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: Europe PMC (en), https://europepmc.org/article/MED/37943842. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

Understanding human use of public lands is essential for management of natural and cultural resources. However, compiling consistently reliable visitation data across large spatial and temporal scales and across different land managing entities is challenging. Cellular device locations have been demonstrated as a source to map human activity patterns and may offer a viable solution to overcome some of the challenges that traditional on-the-ground visitation counts face on public lands. Yet, large-scale applicability of human mobility data derived from cell phone device locations for estimating visitation counts to public lands remains unclear. This study aims to address this knowledge gap by examining the efficacy and limitations of using commercially available cellular data to estimate visitation to public lands. We used the United States' National Park Service's (NPS) 2018 and 2019 monthly visitor use counts as a ground-truth and developed visitation models using cellular device location-derived monthly visitor counts as a predictor variable. Other covariates, including park unit type, porousness, and park setting (i.e., urban vs. non-urban, iconic vs. local), were included in the model to examine the impact of park attributes on the relationship between NPS and cell phone-derived counts. We applied Pearson's correlation and generalized linear mixed model with adjustment of month and accounting for potential clustering by the individual park units to evaluate the reliability of using cell data to estimate visitation counts. Of the 38 parks in our study, 20 parks had a correlation of greater than 0.8 between monthly NPS and cell data counts and 8 parks had a correlation of less than 0.5. Regression modeling showed that the cell data could explain a great amount of the variability (conditional R-squared = 0.96) of NPS counts. However, these relationships varied across parks, with better associations generally observed for iconic parks. While our study increased our confidence in using cell phone data to estimate visitation, we also became aware of some of the limitations and challenges which we present in the Discussion.

Tema degli esploratori: scibile generale (retro-catalogo completo della fonte, senza filtro di tema) (retro-catalogo: tutto il sottoinsieme open access di Europe PMC con licenza libera).
Pubblicazione: PloS one, 2023 (prima pubblicazione 2023-11-09).
Identificativi: PMID 37943842 · PMCID PMC10635495 · DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0289922.
Descrittori MeSH principali: Parks, Recreational; Cell Phone.
Pagina: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/37943842 — https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289922. Autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza dell'articolo dichiarata da Europe PMC: CC0 (la versione è indicata dall'editore sulla pagina). Abstract riportato senza modifiche al contenuto, con attribuzione; deposito marcato CC0.
Letto il 2026-10-07T11:29:04.468Z tramite l'API REST ufficiale di Europe PMC (EMBL-EBI), nel rispetto del robots.txt e del crawl-delay.