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.
Heikinheimo, V., Järv, O., Tenkanen, H., Hiippala, T. & Toivonen, T. Detecting country of residence from social media data: a comparison of methods. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 1–22 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2022.2044484
Olafsson, A. S., Purves, R. S., Wartmann, F. M., -Martin, M. G., Fagerholm, N., Torralba, M., Albert, C., Verbrugge, L. N. H., Heikinheimo, V., Plieninger, T., Bieling, C., Kaaronen, R., Hartmann, M., & Raymond, C. M. (2022). Comparing landscape value patterns between participatory mapping and geolocated social media content across Europe. Landscape and Urban Planning, 226, Artikkeli 104511. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2022.104511
Väisänen, T. L. A., Heikinheimo, V. V., Hiippala, T., & Toivonen, T. (2021). Exploring human–nature interactions in national parks with social media photographs and computer vision. Conservation Biology, 35(2), 424-436. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13704
Hausmann, A., Toivonen, T., Fink, C., Heikinheimo, V., Kulkarni, R., Tenkanen, H., & Di Minin, E. (2020). Understanding sentiment of national park visitors from social media data. People and Nature, 2(3), 750–760. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10130
Heikinheimo, V., Tenkanen, H., Bergroth, C., Järv, O., Hiippala, T., & Toivonen, T. (2020). Understanding the use of urban green spaces from user-generated geographic information. Landscape and Urban Planning, 201, [103845]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2020.103845
Toivonen, T., Heikinheimo, V., Fink, C., Hausmann, A., Hiippala, T., Järv, O., Tenkanen, H., Di Minin, E. (2019). Social media data for conservation science: a methodological overview. Biological Conservation, 233, 298–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.BIOCON.2019.01.023
Hausmann, A., Toivonen, T., Fink, C., Heikinheimo, V., Tenkanen, H., Butchart, S., Brooks, T. & Di Minin, E. (2019). Assessing global popularity and threats to Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas using social media data. Science of the Total Environment, , vol. 683, pp. 617-623. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.05.268
Hausmann, A., Toivonen, T., Slotow, R., Tenkanen, H., Moilanen, A., Heikinheimo, V., & Di Minin, E. (2018). Social Media Data Can Be Used to Understand Tourists’ Preferences for Nature-Based Experiences in Protected Areas. Conservation Letters. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12343
Tenkanen, H., Di Minin, E., Heikinheimo, V., Hausmann, A., Herbst, M., Kajala, L., & Toivonen, T. (2017). Instagram, Flickr, or Twitter: Assessing the usability of social media data for visitor monitoring in protected areas. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 17615. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18007-4
Hausmann, A., Toivonen, T., Heikinheimo, V., Tenkanen, H., Slotow, R., & Di Minin, E. (2017). Social media reveal that charismatic species are not the main attractor of ecotourists to sub-Saharan protected areas. Scientific Reports, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-00858-6
Heikinheimo, V., Di Minin, E., Tenkanen, H., Hausmann, A., Erkkonen, J., & Toivonen, T. (2017). User-Generated Geographic Information for Visitor Monitoring in a National Park: A Comparison of Social Media Data and Visitor Survey. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 6(3). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi6030085
Di Minin, E., Tenkanen, H., & Toivonen, T. (2015). Prospects and challenges for social media data in conservation science. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 3, 63. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2015.0006