Mining crowdsourced text to capture hikers' perceptions associated with landscape features and outdoor physical activities

• Published in: Ecological informatics 2023-12, Vol.78, p.102332, Article 102332
• Main Authors: Chai-allah, Abdesslam, Fox, Nathan, Günther, Fritz, Bentayeb, Fadila, Brunschwig, Gilles, Bimonte, Sandro, Joly, Frédéric
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer Science; Cultural ecosystem services; Document and Text Processing; Environment and Society; Environmental Sciences; Hiking; Natural language processing; Text analysis; Wikiloc
• ISSN: 1574-9541
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoinf.2023.102332

Outdoor recreation provides vital interactions between humans and ecological systems with a range of mental and physical benefits for people. Despite the increased number of studies using crowdsourced online data to assess how people interact with the landscape during recreational activities, the focus remains largely on mapping the spatial distribution of visitors or analyzing the content of shared images and little work has been done to quantify the perceptions and emotions people assign to the landscape. In this study, we used crowdsourced textual data from an outdoor activity-sharing platform (Wikiloc), and applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and correlation analysis to capture hikers' perceptions associated with landscape features and physical outdoor activities. Our results indicate eight clusters based on the semantic similarity between words ranging from four clusters describing landscape features (“ecosystems, animals & plants”, “geodiversity”, “climate & weather”, and “built cultural heritage”), to one cluster describing the range of physical outdoor activities and three clusters indicating hikers' perceptions and emotions (“aesthetics”, “joy & restoration” and “physical effort sensation”). The association analysis revealed that the cluster “ecosystems, animals & plants” is likely to stimulate all three identified perceptions, suggesting that these natural features are important for hikers during their outdoor experience. Moreover, hikers strongly associate the cluster “outdoor physical activities” with both “joy & restoration” and “physical effort sensation” perceptions, highlighting the health and well-being benefits of physical activities in natural landscapes. Our study shows the potential of Wikiloc as a valuable data source to assess human-nature interactions and how textual data can provide significant advances in understanding peoples' preferences and perceptions while recreating. These findings can help inform outdoor recreation planners in the study region by focusing on the elements of the landscape that peoples perceive to be important (i.e. “ecosystems, animals & plants”). •The textual content of social media offers insights on human-nature interactions.•Wikiloc text and word2vec model were used to assess hikers' preferences and perceptions.•We identify the landscape features that stimulate hikers' perceptions.•Ecosystem and landscape features were associated with all types of perceptions.•Understanding hikers' percepti