THE USAGE OF GEOTAGGED SOCIAL MEDIA PHOTOS AS A METHOD TO MONITOR THE TOURISM ACTIVITY IN THE DANUBE DELTA

Abstract

The analysis of geotagged photos from social media platforms is one of the latest forms of obtaining spatial information that can be used by scientist and especially by geographers. This new form of data, named crowd sourced geographic information has been used in studies as a monitoring method of the number of visitors in natural parks or to calculate the intensity with which there are frequented some tourist routes. This paper proposes a methodology that uses geotagged photos to monitor the tourist flows in the Danube Delta based on the information available on Google Earth geobrowser in the form of photos from different locations inside the analyzed area. At the same time we collected information about the content of the photos, which has given us information about the preferences of tourists regarding the landscape. The method that we used to visualize the patterns created by the location of the photos is Kernel Density Estimator (KDE). This method advantage is that it only needs the location of the photos and it shows if there are clusters/ hot-spots in the distribution and at the same time it predicts the density of the photos starting from existing data. Another method that we used to confirm what we observed through KDE is a grid that covers the analyzed area and we noticed that the grid boxes with the greatest number of photos are overlapping with the areas of high density. The value of this paper is given by the fact that not only shows an image of the areas that tourists prefer to go to, it explores a complementary method to estimate the number of tourists, beside the number of overnight stays that is available only for the conventional accommodation units, and so it contributes to spatially adjust the tourists attendance in the deltaic space.