Rachael Fricke, UW Seattle
Talk Abstract Smartphones – and the data we generate with them – have changed how we interact with the outdoors. Geotagged posts to social media can motivate people to visit desirable recreational locations, and social network applications are often scapegoats for overcrowding. However, advances in web scraping also allow us to leverage these data to inform our understanding of human activity in public spaces. Here, we collate numerous streams of anonymous social media and cellular phone records to quantify the spatiotemporal distribution of human activity on waterbodies in western Washington. By exploring applications of cellular data toward mapping human recreation across vast landscapes, we hope to demonstrate the utility of this often-maligned data source for enhancing public resource management. Biography Rachel Fricke is a PhD student in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she also completed her BS. Her work broadly seeks to understand human interactions with freshwaters and inform management strategies accounting for both ecologic and anthropogenic needs. |