Using a location-based game to collect preference information for urban and rural forest planning

Location-based games provide an opportunity to collect crowdsourced, spatially explicit data that can be used in decision-making processes in forest planning. While these games have been more widely used in collecting mapping and modelling data, there is limited research on their suitability for collecting location-based data on human preferences, opinions, and emotions in these contexts. Collecting human-centred data can be resource-intensive and costly, hence exploring the potential of location-based games is important. This study investigates the use of geocaching in gathering meaningful data in urban and rural settings. A methodology was developed wherein surveys were embedded in geocaches on trails located in urban and rural forests in Finland. These surveys collected quantitative, qualitative, and photographic data relating to human-forest relationships and landscape preferences. The findings indicate that trails closer to urban areas with higher population density showed increased cache log volume and survey response rates. Moreover, trails tended to collect most information in the first summer after establishment. It is recommended that future studies employing this methodology create shorter, easily accessible, circular trails and that survey questions should be clear and incorporate a method to verify that submitted responses reflect experiences at the chosen location. Furthermore, forest planning professionals and researchers seeking to utilise location-based games in data collection are advised to engage with the communities active in playing them to ensure success..