The use of crowdsourced (spatial) data in visitor management.
Discussed by the example of a visitor hotspot in Berchtesgaden National Park.
Sabine Hennig, University of Salzburg (AT)
The availability of data is a key concern in protected area management, including visitor management. Obtaining data is often laborious and expensive. New approaches - due to the rapid advances in information and communication technologies ICT - that allow involving the general public in data collection can provide a solution. An increasing number of crowdsourcing applications is available on the Internet such as photo-sharing web-sites (e.g. Flickr), video-sharing web-sites (e.g. Youtube), sound-sharing web-sites (e.g. Sound Map; sound cloud), social media, blogs and forums (e.g. Twitter) and community-based web mapping applications (e.g. OpenStreetMap). But, how can visitor management benefit from these different kinds of data and media? This paper will provide an overview of different crowdsourcing applications and assess the potential for use as well as challenges regarding the provision of visitor management relevant data.