Recreation

Recreation and tourism are important components of many national and local economies and they contribute in innumerable ways to physical wellbeing, learning, and quality of life. To quantify the value of natural environments, the InVEST recreation model predicts the spread of person-days of recreation, based on the locations of natural habitats and other features that factor into people’s decisions about where to recreate. In the absence of empirical data on visitation, we parameterize the model using a proxy for visitation: geotagged photographs posted to the website flickr. Using photographs, the model predicts how future changes to natural features will alter visitation rates and outputs maps showing current and future patterns of recreational use.