Using mobile phone data to examine weather impacts on recreational ecosystem services in an urban protected area.

Mobile phone big data can offer new opportunities for identifying weather impacts on recreational ecosystem services in protected areas. This could be useful to assess how climate change could affect recreational ecosystem services. To explore these opportunities, we utilize mobile phone data and examine impacts of tropical weather (temperature, rainfall, and wind) and holidays on visitor numbers and stay time in an urban protected area in Singapore. These impacts were analyzed by visitors' home regions and ethnic groups as well. The study results showed that rising temperatures below 31.7 °C had positive impacts on visitor numbers, in contrast to the common perception that cooler temperatures would be always preferred for outdoor activities in a tropical region. Meanwhile, these rising temperatures reduced visitor stay time in the protected area. Rain and wind had limited impacts on visitors. Compared to the weather variables, holidays had bigger impacts on visitors, particularly the Chinese group and those visitors living not close to the protected area. The study results highlight several advantages of mobile phone data application to analyzing weather impacts on public use of urban protected areas.

Changes in human-nature relations during pandemic outbreaks: a big data analysis.

Pandemic outbreaks can cause diverse impacts on society by altering human-nature relations. This study analyzed these relational changes during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Swine flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and Ebola outbreaks by applying machine learning and big data analyses of global news articles. The results showed that social-ecological systems play vital roles in analyzing indirect pandemic impacts. Herein, major pandemic impacts, including reduced use of cultural ecosystem services, can be analyzed by big data analyses at the global scale. All the identified pandemic impacts herein were linked to provisioning and cultural ecosystem services, implying that these ecosystem services might be more recognized or valued more by the public than regulating and supporting ecosystem services. Further, the pandemic impacts were presented with human-centric views, indicating a challenge to adapting nature-based solutions to mitigate the risk of future pandemic emergences. These findings will advance the current knowledge of diverse pandemic impacts and human-nature relations.

Travel cost analysis of an urban protected area and parks in Singapore: a mobile phone data application.

Big data have the potential to improve nonmarket valuation, but their application has been scarce. To test this potential, we apply mobile phone data to the zonal travel cost method and measure recreational ecosystem services from Bukit Timah (representing an urban protected area) and Jurong Lake Gardens (an urban recreational park) in Singapore. The study results show that the annual recreational benefits of the recreational park (S$54,698,761 to S$66,805,454) outweighed the benefits of the protected area (S$6,947,974 to S$9,068,027). The count data structure reduced the flexibility of the mobile phone data application. Compared to survey data, however, mobile phone data could prevent random errors and visitor memory biases; monitor impacts of site quality changes over time; count visitors from multiple entrances; and be cost-efficient. Overall, these results highlight the potential of mobile phone data application to improve travel cost analysis.

Estimating water user demand for certification of forest watershed services.

Eco-certification is one solution to the common problem of verification of delivery of services in payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes. Certification incurs costs, which may limit uptake, so it should be able to benefit users of certified services for it succeeds. In part to inform a project targeting expansion of the Forest Stewardship Council's forest management certification to include ecosystem services, we tested market demand for a potential certification scheme for watershed services. Using choice experiments among end-users of water subject to an existing PES scheme in Lombok, Indonesia, we assessed potential business values of certification. Our results suggested that preferred business values included credible information disclosure on improved water quality, reduced flood risk, environmental safeguards, and/or social safeguards of the upstream forests. These preferences indicate potential demand for a certification of forest watershed services designed to provide such information to end users.