Abstract
To the Editor:
We are delighted to hear that our article “The Associations between Visitation, Social Media Use, and Search and Rescue in United States National Parks” 1 has generated discussion. 2 We are replying regarding our study’s methodology and data collection.
Twitter was the only social media platform included in our study because of the readily accessible data compiled by the University of California Irvine Cloudberry application, which collected the total number of related tweets per keyword in the specified date range. We agree that other social media platforms, such as Instagram, may provide additional data and insight into national park visitation and search and rescue. However, the accessibility of these data from other platforms was limited, as was our experience with developing a code to obtain data pertinent to our study. Given the limited quantity of current research describing associations between the use of social media and search and rescue, we opted to share our findings using the most readily accessible data with the hope of encouraging further partnership among national parks, public health and safety officials, and social media platforms.
Although the Cloudberry application collects geographic data on how many related tweets are posted in each city, we chose to include the total number of tweets per national park keyword based on the assumption that several visitors wait until they return home before posting. We recognize that this is a limitation of our study and agree that there can be high value in assessing more immediate use of social media in parks from a prospective standpoint, such as researchers surveying visitors on their use of social media in popular park areas.
Social media is a continually evolving and valuable way in which people communicate. As national parks continue to gain popularity, attracting hundreds of millions of visitors every year, it is imperative to both develop ways of employing social media as a unique storytelling forum and encourage safe practices and environmental stewardship.