Park visitation in the context of Khartoum town

Parks improve people's physical and mental well-being, strengthen communities, and make towns and neighborhoods more appealing places to live and work. Many reasons discourage frequent park visitations, such as poor park characteristics, poor management system, and the lack of programs to encourage park visitation. Participation in different outdoor activities has become a necessity for many people nowadays. However, many residents are not engaged in recreational activities in Khartoum, making parks an important element. Therefore, the study aimed at investigating parks characteristics and different patterns of users based on societal needs. The study concentrates on the residents' characteristics such as age, gender, income, education level; these characteristics are tested against park visitation patterns such as type of visitation, the best day for visitation, and visit frequency. A two hundred and fifty (250) participant questionnaire survey was carried out in Al Tifl Park to assess the park's visitation pattern based on the purposive sampling technique. The result shows that most of the visitation patterns were not frequent regardless of the visitors' characteristics. It proves that the visitation pattern was not based on the visitors' characteristics but rather on the park characteristics. The study recommends that the park's features be redesigned based on user affinity to improve visitation, visitor benefits, and income generation.

Multifaceted interactions between urban humans and biodiversity-related concepts: A developing-country dataset

Urban humans and biodiversity-related concepts are interacting with each other in many negative and positive ways. The biodiversity provides a wide array of provision and cultural-ecological services to urban residents, but it is being overexploited to the point of crisis. The crisis is largely driven by the expanding illegal wildlife trade in developing countries with a high urbanization rate and biodiversity level like Vietnam. While supply-side measures are ineffective in reducing biodiversity loss, researchers have suggested demand-side measures as supplements, such as social marketing campaigns and law enforcement in urban areas. Moreover, urban residents are also potential visitors to urban public parks and national parks, which helps generate finance for biodiversity preservation and conservation in those places. Understanding how urban residents' perceptions towards biodiversity and biodiversity-related behaviors can help improve the effectiveness of conservation efforts and sustainable urban development. Thus, this article presents a dataset of 535 urban residents' wildlife consumption behaviors, multifaceted perceptions and interactions with biodiversity-related concepts, and nature-based recreation demand. The dataset is constructed with six major categories: 1) wildlife product consumption, 2) general biodiversity perceptions, 3) biodiversity at home and neighborhood, 4) public park visitation and motivations, 5) national park visitation and motivations, and 6) socio-demographic profiles. These resources are expected to support researchers in enriching the lax literature regarding the role of urban residents in biodiversity conservation and preservation, and help policymakers to find insights for building up an “eco-surplus culture” among urban residents through effective public communication and policymaking.

Using Mobile Device Data to Track the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Spatiotemporal Patterns of National Park Visitation

Effective quantification of visitation is important for understanding many impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on national parks and other protected areas. In this study, we mapped and analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of visitation for six national parks in the western U.S., taking advantage of large mobility records sampled from mobile devices and released by SafeGraph as part of their Social Distancing Metric dataset. Based on comparisons with visitation statistics released by the U.S. National Park Service, our results confirmed that mobility records from digital devices can effectively capture park visitation patterns but with much finer spatiotemporal granularity. In general, triggers of visitation changes corresponded well with the parks’ management responses to COVID-19, with all six parks showing dramatic decreases in the number of visitors (compared to 2019) beginning in March 2020 and continuing through April and May. As restrictions were eased to promote access to the parks and the benefits associated with outdoor recreation, visitation in 2020 approached or even passed that from 2019 by late summer or early autumn at most of the parks. The results also revealed that parks initially saw the greatest increases in visitation after reopening originating from nearby states, with visitorship coming from a broader range of states as time passed. Our study highlights the capability of mobility data for providing spatiotemporally explicit knowledge of place visitation.

Using multi-source data to understand the factors affecting mini-park visitation in Yancheng

Mini-parks are becoming a popular form of outdoor recreational space in densely populated areas, largely because their small size makes site selection easier than for ordinary parks. However, existing studies on mini-parks are limited because most of them rely on data collected through traditional surveys, which are severely restricted by space and time. In this study, we utilised Tencent user density data – a type of space–time synchronous data with high spatial resolution – to trace mini-park visitation in the main city of Yancheng, China, and we integrated data about land use, points of interest, transportation, demographics and housing prices to measure the parks’ surrounding features. We investigated how factors relating to the parks’ spatial and internal attributes, surrounding physical features and surrounding socio-economic features affected the number of park visits during the week versus during the weekend by establishing a series of multiple linear regression models. The results showed that higher resident population, more surrounding public toilets and larger open site promoted mini-park visits while distance to the city centre, surrounding large parks and main roads discouraged mini-park visits. This study also found that the effects of weekend visitation factors were more complex than those of weekday visitation factors. These findings can help urban green space planners and decision makers to efficiently allocate mini-parks to areas where they will be most effective.

Public parks and the pandemic: How park usage has been affected by COVID-19 policies

Public parks serve an important societal function as recreational spaces for diverse communities of people, with well documented physical and mental health benefits. As such, parks may be crucial for how people have handled effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the increasingly limited recreational opportunities, widespread financial uncertainty, and consequent heightened anxiety. Despite the documented benefits of parks, however, many states have instituted park shutdown orders due to fears that public parks could facilitate SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Here we use geotagged social media data from state, county, and local parks throughout New Jersey to examine whether park visitation increased when the COVID-19 pandemic began and whether park shutdown orders were effective at deterring park usage. We compare park usage during four discrete stages of spring 2020: (1) before the pandemic began, (2) during the beginning of the pandemic, (3) during the New Jersey governor’s state-wide park shutdown order, and (4) following the lifting of the shutdown. We find that park visitation increased by 63.4% with the onset of the pandemic. The subsequent park shutdown order caused visitation in closed parks to decline by 76.1% while parks that remained open continued to experience elevated visitation levels. Visitation then returned to elevated pre-shutdown levels when closed parks were allowed to reopen. Altogether, our results indicate that parks continue to provide crucial services to society, particularly in stressful times when opportunities for recreation are limited. Furthermore, our results suggest that policies targeting human behavior can be effective and are largely reversible. As such, we should continue to invest in public parks and to explore the role of parks in managing public health and psychological well-being.