COVID-19’s impact on visitation behavior to US national parks from communities of color

evidence from mobile phone data

authored by
Charles Alba, Bing Pan, Junjun Yin, William L. Rice, Prasenjit Mitra, Michael S. Lin, Yun Liang
Abstract

The widespread COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed many people’s ways of life. With the necessity of social distancing and lock downs across the United States, evidence shows more people engage in outdoor activities. With the utilization of location-based service (LBS) data, we seek to explore how visitation patterns to national parks changed among communities of color during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that visitation rates to national parks located closer than 347 km to individuals have increased amidst the pandemic, but the converse was demonstrated amongst parks located further than 347 km from individuals. More importantly, COVID-19 has adversely impacted visitation figures amongst non-white and Native American communities, with visitation volumes declining if these communities are situated further from national parks. Our results show disproportionately low-representations amongst national park visitors from these communities of color. African American communities display a particularly concerning trend whereby their visitation to national parks is substantially lower amongst communities closer to national parks.

Organisation(s)
L3S Research Centre
External Organisation(s)
University of Warwick
Pennsylvania State University
University of Montana
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Type
Article
Journal
Scientific reports
Volume
12
ISSN
2045-2322
Publication date
04.08.2022
Publication status
Published
Peer reviewed
Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas
General
Electronic version(s)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-16330-z (Access: Open)