We live in an era of unprecedented anthropogenic Global Change, facing the realities of both the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis. The impacts of these crises are likely to become gradually more visible in everyday lives, including how people use protected and greens spaces. In MOBICON, we aim to understand these changes to visits and interaction with nature. We will explore both the physical visits and their digital representations through the lens provided by Mobile Big Data sources, including social media, mobile phone records, sports applications and internet content. The acquired knowledge will help to understand the implications of the observed and projected changes for biodiversity conservation.
Understanding the trajectories of change in use of green areas is vital for proactive and successful conservation decisions of the future, in all parts of the world. When successful, the project will lead the way scientifically for applying big data analysis to understand nature visitations and changes therein. It will also support practical biodiversity conservation management decisions so that they may be made proactively instead of reactively. To achieve these goals, we apply a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods – for example, surveys, stakeholder engagement workshops, computer vision and natural language processing, and spatial analysis.
This project is funded by the Kone foundation for four years (2022–2026) and has gained additional funding from the Nordernskiöld samfundet.