Journal
ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
Volume 49, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2021.101297
Keywords
Cultural ecosystem services; Recreation; Urban parks and forests; Urban wilderness continuum; Instagram; Hashtags
Categories
Funding
- Narodowe Centrum Nauki, Poland [2018/31/B/HS4/01381]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Urban green spaces (UGS) offer convenient contact with nature for most of the world's population, providing various recreational ecosystem services (RES) to visitors. The study explores how different types of UGS deliver RES and how access changes impact use patterns, using Instagram data from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Warsaw, Poland. The findings show that the intensity and pattern of recreational use in UGS are highly influenced by the characteristics of green spaces and abrupt changes in access, as demonstrated during the recent outbreak.
For most of the world's population, urban green spaces (UGS) offer the easiest form of contact with nature. Such environments deliver a wide variety of Recreational Ecosystem Services (RES) to visitors. This paper explores RES delivery in different types of UGS, differentiated with respect to their naturalness and distance from the city centre. Furthermore, it investigates how the identified use patterns are affected by an abrupt change in access. We extract data from Instagram, posted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, for Warsaw, Poland, and use it to measure both the intensity of use of UGS, and the experience of Instagram users. Furthermore, we compare these data with data from the same period for the previous year (2019). Our results indicate that, in typical conditions, the wilder the area, the fewer visitors. RES patterns changed, however, when access to UGS was restricted. The recent COVID-19 outbreak showed that soon after restrictions on visiting UGS were lifted, recreation shifted towards wilder green areas. Moreover, users became more oriented to wild nature. We conclude that the number of visitors, and the pattern of recreational use of UGS, are highly dependent on the character of green spaces across the urban wilderness continuum, and that they are influenced by abrupt changes in access.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available