You can put a price on people’s access to nature, and for states, it’s a pretty good deal. A new study uses selfies taken on conserved lands, like state parks, to calculate more precise visitor rates than parks services typically record, finding that nature preserves provide a pretty good boost to the tourist economy, as Popular Science reports.
A study led by the University of Vermont’s Laura Sonter (who’s taking the selfie in the image above) examined geo-tagged photos uploaded to Flickr, and compared them to maps of conserved lands in Vermont created by the Nature Conservancy. Using photos from 2007 to 2014, the researchers counted the number of people each day who uploaded at least one photo from the specified areas. The research is published in PLOS ONE.
via Mental Floss
