DJ&A worked with the U.S. National Park Service and California State Parks (CSP) to analyze parkwide visitor use volumes and patterns using mobile location data for Redwood National and State Parks. We worked in collaboration with the U.S. National Park Service and CSP project core team to design the study to address unique challenges for tracking and quantifying outdoor recreation use in the parks. The key project challenges included the multi-jurisdictional nature of the parks complex and the fact that there is significant commuter traffic on Highway 101, Highway 199, and other state and regional roads that pass through the parks system. Correspondingly, our approach necessarily involved substantial and careful geofencing of non-recreation roads and areas to eliminate commuter traffic from our estimates of outdoor recreation use while not inadvertently eliminating vehicle-based outdoor recreation use from the analysis. We applied this geofencing to a geospatial boundaries layer we prepared containing the boundaries of the National and State Parks. We applied additional geofencing to represent subregions of the park complex that we used to analyze intra- and inter-park use patterns.
We acquired LBS data for the analysis and performed data cleaning and filtering to eliminate data errors prior to our analysis. We produced a series of visitor use metrics, including estimates of relative use, by federal and state jurisdiction and by park subregion, patterns of use within and among federal and state jurisdictions and park subregions, overall park dwell times and dwell times by jurisdiction and park subregion, and drive distances within the park. The U.S. National Park Service and CSP have used the results of the project to update and improve their visitor counting and visitor use statistics reporting procedures, providing them with a more robust and reliable basis to monitor and manage visitor use in the parks system.
Key Services
- Study design and methods development
- Statistical and geospatial analysis
- Passive mobile data analysis
- Visitation estimation modeling
- Project report and virtual presentations
