Towards a digital ranger: Using data from outdoor platforms to detect rule violations in protected areas and improve visitor management

Protected areas aim to preserve nature and biodiversity while also providing space for outdoor activities and recreation. Visitor management, ideally based on visitor monitoring data, is crucial to balance conservation goals with the requirements of recreationists. Regulations such as prohibiting off-trail movements and temporal restrictions on the access to certain trails or areas are among the most common measures used to minimize the negative impacts of recreation on conservation goods in protected areas. In recent years, online platforms and outdoor apps have become an increasingly popular data source for visitor monitoring, but few studies have made use of their data to detect rule violations in protected areas. In this study, track data obtained from the online platforms Outdooractive and Bikemap were used to analyze the spatial distribution of hikers and bikers in the Bavarian Forest National Park, Germany, and thus to identify and localize rule violations. The analysis showed that the most frequently used trails followed the designated trail network. However, 15% of the hiking tracks and 31% of the bike tracks did not comply with national park rules and instead followed informal trails, were off-trail or disregarded temporal restrictions. Popular places for hikers were identified as well including mountain peaks, raised bogs, mountain pastures, lakes and streams, mainly in areas at higher elevations. Cyclists clustered in areas of lower elevation and on the outskirts of the national park. Knowledge derived from online tracks is helpful in developing management strategies for better visitor steering. Such measures can take place in the field as well as online to influence content on outdoor platforms and proactively communicate protected area information to visitors.