Popularity of Australian beaches: Insights from social media images for coastal management

Coastal landscapes such as beaches are popular as they provide a range of leisure opportunities for locals and tourists, with people increasingly sharing these experiences on social media. Researchers have started to harness social media data to assess how people engage with coastal landscapes but most studies are at local scales. We expand this approach by examining the popularity of close to 12,000 beaches across Australia including temporal, spatial, text and sentiment analysis including Generalized Linear Models. Metadata associated with 32,383 images from Flickr tagged "beaches" and "Australia" posted by 1,254 Australians, and 1,154 international tourists were obtained. With images representing around 9,000 visitor days and covering 33% of the 60,000 km coastline, differences were apparent where Australians were more likely to visit beaches on weekends than weekdays and northern beaches in winter but southern beaches in summer: factors that were less important for international tourist. Australians were also more likely to post images of beaches in capital cities and tagged them with words relating to natural features, while international tourists also posted images of urban and more remote beaches and tag them with geographical locations. The text of tags reinforced how some Australian beaches are very popular and that they are predominantly associated with positive emotions. Despite limitations associated with these methods, the results highlight how social media data can be used to complement other approaches for large scale monitoring of coastal landscapes including identify priority areas for active management using a rapid, remote and low-cost approach.