Harnessing smartphones to track how people use green spaces - EurekAlert

A caller survey demonstrates however anonymized GPS information from people’s smartphones tin beryllium utilized to show the public’s usage of parks and different greenish spaces successful municipality areas, which could assistance pass their management. Alessandro Filazzola of ApexRMS and the University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada, and colleagues contiguous these findings successful the open-access diary PLOS Computational Biology connected December 15, 2022.

Parks and different greenish spaces successful municipality areas execute respective cardinal functions, including promotion of quality carnal and intelligence health, preservation of ecosystem biodiversity, and services specified arsenic stormwater absorption and vigor reduction. People’s interactions with greenish spaces power these functions, but it is challenging to seizure quality enactment astatine a good capable solution to pass greenish abstraction management. Anonymized GPS information from people’s smartphones could assistance code this challenge.

To show specified an approach, Filazzola and colleagues analyzed anonymized smartphone information that captured people’s visits to 53 greenish spaces successful the greater Toronto country successful Canada, including parks, way systems, and areas closed to the nationalist for conservation purposes.

They recovered that the GPS information did so seizure insights astir people’s usage of these greenish spaces, showing, for instance, that mobile instrumentality enactment was powerfully correlated with information connected reservations made by radical to entree parks. The information besides revealed which areas wrong greenish spaces had much oregon little quality activity, with established trails being peculiarly popular. In addition, greater quality beingness was linked to definite types of onshore cover, specified arsenic stone formations, arsenic good arsenic definite histrion species.

These findings item the imaginable for anonymized GPS smartphone information to assistance pass absorption of greenish spaces, particularly arsenic cities turn worldwide. Such efforts could optimize the benefits of greenish spaces for radical portion besides preserving biodiversity.

The researchers enactment respective challenges to this approach, specified arsenic immoderate people’s inclination to disconnect from the mobile devices erstwhile visiting greenish spaces and the trouble of distinguishing betwixt a astute telephone located wrong a greenish abstraction versus passing successful a car conscionable extracurricular the perimeter. Future probe could code these issues and refine the methodology.

The authors add: “Access to parks is important for metropolis residents for recreation, connecting to nature, and socialization, but it’s challenging to recognize however radical usage these greenish spaces. Our survey is utilizing anonymized mobility information to assistance shed airy connected narration betwixt radical and quality successful parks.”

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In your coverage, delight usage this URL to supply entree to the freely disposable nonfiction successful PLOS Computational Biology: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010725

Citation: Filazzola A, Xie G, Barrett K, Dunn A, Johnson MTJ, MacIvor JS (2022) Using smartphone-GPS information to quantify quality enactment successful greenish spaces. PLoS Comput Biol 18(12): e1010725. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010725

Author Countries: Canada

Funding: This probe was funded by a Post-Doctoral Fellowship awarded to AF by the Center for Urban Environments and School of Cities astatine the University of Toronto, Canada. GX was funded by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a Center for Environmental Research successful the Anthropocene Graduate Fellowship, and NSERC CREATE backing (# 401276521) awarded to JSM. The funders had nary relation successful survey design, information postulation and analysis, determination to publish, oregon mentation of the manuscript.