No visit, no interest: How COVID-19 has affected public interest in world's national parks
| Autor: | Adriana Rosa Carvalho, Richard J. Ladle, Carolina N. Souza, Ana Carla Rodrigues, Iran C. Normande, Ana C. M. Malhado, Hugo C. M. Costa, Ricardo A. Correia, Jhonatan Guedes-Santos |
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| Přispěvatelé: | Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS), Helsinki Lab of Interdisciplinary Conservation Science, Department of Geosciences and Geography |
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
1171 Geosciences
0106 biological sciences Conservation culturomics BIG DATA Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Digital content Big data 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences Public interest Development economics Pandemic Nature tourism medicine Social isolation 1172 Environmental sciences Ecology Evolution Behavior and Systematics Nature and Landscape Conservation DEGAZETTEMENT business.industry 010604 marine biology & hydrobiology COVID-19 PROTECTED AREAS Geography Quantitative analysis (finance) Scale (social sciences) National parks medicine.symptom business |
| Zdroj: | Biological Conservation. 256:109015 |
| ISSN: | 0006-3207 |
| Popis: | The use of digital content has become a powerful tool to evaluate and track macro-scale trends in human-nature relations. This is an emerging field of study known as conservation culturomics, that seeks to understand human culture through quantitative analysis in large bodies of digital content. Here, we used relative search volume on Google Search as a culturomic metric of public interest to investigate the global impact of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic on national parks (NPs). Specifically, we focus on the impacts of limiting people?s mobility (through social isolation and lock-down measures) on public interest in NPs, since this is likely to have a strong causal relationship with park visitation. We generated public interest data for 2411 NPs from around the world for the period January 2016 to July 2020, to explore the relationship between relative search volume and periods of greater and lesser mobility restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We observed a global trend of declining public interest in national parks during the initial phase of the coronavirus pandemic, although there was considerable variation between both parks and countries. For example, contrary to the global trend public interest in NPs increased in Finland during the first lock-down. Significantly, countries whose national parks are highly dependent on international visitors (e.g., South Africa and India) had very severe declines in public interest. Our study reinforces the key role that visitation plays in driving public interest in national parks and illustrates the utility of culturomic methods for monitoring human-park interactions at scale. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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