Big data in forest recreation monitoring

Growing urbanization belongs to major global challenges for many reasons. Urban areas are human-environment systems that depend fundamentally on ecosystems, and therefore require an understanding of the management of urban ecosystem services to ensure sustainable urban planning. Forest areas, especially those located in close proximity to urban amenities play an important role in Central Europe, as they provide crucial cultural ecosystem services to city inhabitants and largely contribute to their psycho-physical health and well-being. The social functions of forests are becoming increasingly recognized as being very important for the society. A significant body of research has been done in the field of conceptualization and quantification of ecosystem services (ES) in order to provide better understanding of social-ecological systems. This project focuses on cultural ecosystem services (CES) provided by urban and sub-urban forest sites in metropolitan areas of two capital cities: Vienna (Austria) and Warsaw (Poland). In particular, it aims to explore current international BIG DATA resources and investigate their potential and limitations for studing social demand for nature and the supply function of forest ecosystems within recreational context. Multiple digital data resources including those coming from ICT (mobile phone data, social media, Volunteered Geographic Information), open spatial data along with socio-empirical observations based on online panel survey accompanied by Public Participation GIS will be used in the project. They will be integrated and jointly used to investigate spatially explicit human mobility around metropolis and therefore also the need and use of forests in the study areas. Interdisciplinary team of scientists from Austria and Poland combine their expertise in social science, forestry, recreation monitoring along with geoinformation and big data analytics to address innovative research subject using most recent data resources and technological advances. The project will use an advanced cyber-infrastructure provided by the Centre for Scientific Geospatial Analyses and Satellite Computations of the Warsaw University of Technology, in order to track human mobility and develop spatially explicit models of cultural ecosystem services in urban and sub-urban forest areas around studied metropolis.