One of the joys of going on vacation in today’s world is sharing our photos on social media. Whether we post them ourselves, or enjoy photos shared from someone else’s sun-soaked, lakeside vacation, now these pictures are being used for more than evoking slight pangs of envy. Scientists from the University of Washington and other institutions are using geotagged images to better understand why people choose to visit one body of water over another, how water health might play into that decision, and how much individuals might be willing to pay to keep their lakes clean.
Natural Capital Project’s Spencer Wood, a research scientist working out of the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS), is part of the group of researchers who analyzed 41,000 geotagged, publicly accessible photos uploaded to Flickr to see which lakes in Minnesota and Iowa are most frequented by visitors, and compared water-quality data from those lakes to explore how lake clarity and lake popularity are related.
By looking at tens of thousands of unique, anonymized photo records, the researchers were able to determine how many people spent time vacationing at lakes in these states between 2005 and 2012. They also assessed where lake-goers were coming from and the distances each photographer traveled to enjoy their chosen lake. During that eight-year period, people shared pictures from 1,149 lakes, traveling from most of the US states and 36 countries. With this giant and diverse data set, scientists were able to tease out the effect that clearer lakes have on visitation rates and travel distances. They found that people are significantly more likely to spend their vacation time at lakes with clearer water, and willing to drive almost an hour longer, incurring costs of about $22, for every 1-meter increase in water clarity.
This study provides another example of the opportunities social media, citizen participation, and big data present in studying environmental patterns and problems. It also highlights the importance of water quality, not just for the ecosystems of the lakes, rivers and streams, but also for us humans who enjoy them.
There are over 40,000 bodies of fresh water listed as endangered by the US Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Water Act. Enforcing the cleanup and maintenance of these lakes, rivers, and streams is costly, and leads some to wonder if it’s worth it. Until now, no one had quantified the recreational benefits of surface water quality in lakes. This new research suggests that, in fact, clean water has a measurable and substantial economic value for recreational purposes. Knowing the return on investment, the value of clean water to our health and economy, can help us better manage those resources.
You can read the paper, titled “Recreational demand for clean water: evidence from geotagged photographs by visitors to lakes”, in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
– Written by: Jen Davison
