Applying Novel Visitation Models using Diverse Social Media to Understand Recreation Change after Wildfire and Site Closure

Wildfires are becoming more severe and more frequent. Scientists know a lot about how these fires affect ecosystems, but much less about how they, and the management responses that follow, change the way people use public lands.

Part of the challenge is simply measuring how many people visit a given area. Different landowners track visitation in different ways, and many don’t track it at all.

To get around that, researchers turned to social media data to build visitation models. They looked at what happened to recreation patterns after a major wildfire and the site closures that followed. What they found was striking. In the two years after the fire, the recreation system as a whole lost visitors. And there was very little evidence of people simply shifting their trips to nearby sites, what researchers call “displacement.”

The study underscores a key point: when trying to predict how wildfires and management decisions will affect recreation, it’s not enough to look at the fire itself. Planners need to consider a range of factors that shape where people choose to go, including where visitors are coming from, where the fire happened, and what alternative sites are available.

Abstract

Natural disturbances such as wildfires are increasing in severity and frequency. Although the ecological impacts of disturbance are well documented, we have limited understanding of how disturbances and associated management responses influence recreation use patterns. This reflects, in part, difficulty in quantifying recreation use across different land ownerships with inconsistent, or non-existent, recreation monitoring practices. In this study, we use visitation models based on social media to examine how recreation use changed after a wildfire and site closures in a large, mixed-ownership landscape. We find that wildfire and associated closures resulted in visitation loss to the recreation system as a whole and little site-to-site displacement within the system in the two years following the wildfire. Our study highlights the importance, when considering how wildfire and management may alter recreation use patterns, of considering the many factors that influence substitution behavior, including the relative locations of visitor origins, disturbances, and substitute sites.