Enhancing monitoring in protected areas: evaluating mobile apps as a tourism proxy

Crowdsourced data, such as that from mobile fitness apps (MFAs), has the potential to transform tourism research. This opportunity is particularly valuable as tourism to protected areas (PAs) increases, making it more difficult to manage their environmental impacts. However, such data sources come with challenges. Therefore, their representativeness should be carefully evaluated, particularly as their use continues to grow. We use the Paiva Walkways (Portugal) to assess MFAs as a tourism proxy using Spearman’s rank correlation, to evaluate kernel density and fishnet methods for spatialising visitor movements, and to analyse the visitors’ spatiotemporal behaviour using GIS, kernel density estimation, and frequency distribution analysis. Our findings show that the digital records of MFAs correlate with the analogue ticket records; that both kernel density and fishnet methods are effective, but parameter selection affects the detail level and computing processing time; and that visitation to the Paiva Walkways exhibits temporal fluctuations, with higher numbers during summer, August, and on weekends. MFAs effectively represent visitors’ spatiotemporal behaviour, for example, by measuring peak visitation periods. However, MFA data do not increase proportionally with ticket data, suggesting that high-pressure visiting periods may be underrepresented in MFAs. Overall, MFAs provide detailed data that offer new opportunities for tourism geographies research. MFAs data can be used to quantify tourism in PAs, to understand how visitors use space and interact with the surrounding environment, and to analyse how these spatial patterns change over time. MFAs also excel at detecting unauthorised activities, but require careful data curation and a transparent explanation of the selection approach to achieve high-quality, consistent, and replicable results. MFA-based monitoring is an important proxy that expands the information available to stakeholders and park managers about tourism and leisure activities, thereby enabling effective management and promoting sustainable tourism.