Serious ecotourists: discovering a new tourism segment with crowdsourced geo-information

Ecotourism research has long struggled to identify tourists motivated not only by nature-based experiences but also by scientific contributions. This study argues that contributors to iNaturalist—a large biodiversity observation platform—exhibit behavioral patterns consistent with an overlooked segment of citizen-science nature tourists. Drawing on motivation theory, serious leisure, and citizen science scholarship, the study conceptualizes this group as niche ecotourists whose intrinsic interests in outdoor recreation converge with prosocial commitments to knowledge production. Using 49 million species observations, it distinguishes between local activity and travel, examines observers’ occupations, and assesses the spatiotemporal structure of their biodiversity documentation. Results show that contributors are predominantly amateurs rather than professionals, and that their travel patterns align with established ecotourism goals: repeated trips to accessible, high-biodiversity regions and unique, long-distance journeys to iconic nature destinations. These findings support the interpretation of biodiversity-documenting iNaturalist contributors as a behaviorally identifiable segment consistent with serious ecotourism. Conceptually, the study highlights a convergence between ecotourism and citizen science, where experiential and collective motivations reinforce one another. Methodologically, it offers a reproducible approach for extracting tourism flows from volunteered geographic information. The analysis offers new opportunities to identify emerging ecotourism hotspots and to integrate recreation into conservation plannin.