How national parks can leverage location-based service data to further sustainability

Location-based service (LBS) data, which passively tracks location information from visitors’ devices like smartphones and watches, can be leveraged by national parks to gain insight into general and large-scale trends, according to a new study from researchers in the Penn State Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management.

This data can help park staff identify highly tracked trails and understand the sustainability of these routes. They can also begin to understand the implications of overtourism which can have a negative impact on surrounding communities or the environment.

Led by Bing Pan, professor of commercial recreation and tourism, and doctoral candidate Colby Parkinson, the researchers published their findings in the journal Sustainability.

“We want to examine whether LBS data would provide similar insights as traditional approaches,” Pan said. “Traditional approaches involve giving visitors high-quality GPS devices that tracked their location in relatively short, even intervals.”

The research team sampled data from 539 visitors at Grand Canyon National Park over two years during the early summer. Participating visitors carried a portable GPS device with them for the duration of their park visit. The researchers also tracked visitor movements via an LBS application, which included nearly 2 million GPS waypoints from nearly 40,000 devices that could be used to track movement.

The researchers said LBS data was consistent with traditional approaches when measuring general movements between popular areas and rates of overnight stay. However, LBS data differed from traditional approaches when measuring most individual-level metrics — like the number of attractions visited — and metrics at more refined scales — like the time spent at specific attractions.

Practitioners may consider using LBS data to gain insight into general and large-scale trends, according to the researchers. Parkinson and colleagues, however, recommend being cautious of using LBS data for metrics at the intra-attraction level, which is visitor movement within a specific destination, based on their findings.

“If findings were the same for LBS data as traditional location data-tracking approaches, it would mean that more expensive traditional approaches could be adapted or replaced by LBS data in tourism and recreation areas at a fraction of the cost,” Parkinson said. “That could greatly improve access to high-quality visitor use management data, informing park policies for wildlife protection, infrastructure investment, and safety protocols. However, if the measures differed greatly between the two datasets, it would mean that recreation and tourism destinations should exercise caution when using or relying on LBS data.”

The researchers said results suggest that LBS data could help address other human behavior that may have implications for social, economic and environmental sustainability. Specifically, cities and recreation areas can improve their understanding of demand and potential overuse by examining the number of days people spend in pre-defined areas, the relative number of people who use amenities and the spillover from amenities to other areas.

“LBS data is already being used in the field by organizations ranging from local destination marketing organizations to federal land management agencies, so documenting its limitations could help identify ideal use cases for the emerging data,” Parkinson said. “LBS data is becoming a prominent tool in recreation and tourism management. Our evidence reinforces that LBS data is reliable at crude scales while revealing that it is more limited at more refined scales.”

Derrick Taff, associate professor of recreation, park, and tourism management at Penn State; Guangqing Chi, professor of rural sociology, demography, and public health sciences at Penn State; Sophie Morris and William Rice of the University of Montana; and Peter Newman, dean of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont and former head of the Penn State Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management, collaborated on this research.

The Grand Canyon National Park and the Penn State Center for Social Data Analytics Graduate Student Accelerator Award supported this research.

Originally published March 2025.