Q&A: Can U.S. parks promote safety, recreation and environmental protection?

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Over the past two days, heavy rains have caused flooding in Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks, resulting in the loss of at least two lives. In U.S. national parks, maintaining visitor safety can be complicated because it is difficult to measure who is in a park and where they are, much less what hazards they will face as extreme weather events become more common, according to Bing Pan, professor of recreation, park, and tourism management at Penn State.

Beyond visitor safety, national parks have a potentially contradictory dual mission: protecting natural areas while also facilitating recreational use of those areas. In the first two decades of this century, Pan said visitors to national parks increased roughly 50%, straining the natural environment and the parks’ infrastructures.

For years, Pan has studied how parks and other protected areas can manage visitors in ways that maximize human safety, ecological protection and enjoyment of park attractions. Recently, Pan and his colleagues at Penn State were awarded more than $1 million in funding from the National Park Foundation to use mobile phone data to measure visitor traffic in four national parks.

In this Q&A, Pan discussed how parks balance safety, conservation and visitor experiences; how to measure park visitation; and why both shared and solitary experiences in natural areas can be so valuable.

Q: When you think about visiting national parks, how much of a concern is safety?

Pan: Safety is probably the most critical component of a visitor's experience. In recent years, there has been an increase in extreme weather events that have led to more destructive wildfires, floods and other disasters. In the past few days, catastrophic flooding has resulted in multiple deaths and missing persons.

The last I heard, only one person is known to be missing in the Grand Canyon flood, but that list only accounts for registered hikers. If there were people in the canyon who were not registered, the park service would have no way of knowing. In backcountry areas, it can be extremely difficult to know how many people are present or how to contact them.

In recent years, I have collaborated with two national parks to develop fire evacuation plans. As wildfires become more common, plans are needed. We have facilitated meetings where parks, local officials, local residents, law enforcement and other stakeholders sit down together — often for the first time ever — to develop a common plan. Additionally, we have used computer modeling to predict traffic bottlenecks and communication barriers in the event of an evacuation.

Floods like the ones in the West right now are so sudden that there is seldom an opportunity to evacuate in advance. Still, a solid, coordinated plan is critical to keeping visitors as safe as possible. Fortunately, we have dedicated people working very hard to save lives and keep others safe in our parks as these floods continue.

Q: The mission of U.S. national parks includes both protecting wild areas and letting people enjoy those spaces. Can those two ideas coexist?

Pan: Fundamentally, these ideas are in conflict. Every area has an ecological capacity — an amount of use that, if surpassed, will harm the natural environment. In simplistic terms, if too many people step on a plant, it will die. If there is too much pollution from vehicles and other human activities, the wildness that people seek in parks and other natural areas will disappear.

Every park also has a visitor capacity. How much parking is available? How many bathrooms are there? How many miles of trails are there and how many hikers can they accommodate to provide the optimal experience? These factors determine how many people can use the park at one time. If visitors wait 30 minutes to use a portable toilet and then hike in a huge line of people, they probably will not be very happy. But if you build more infrastructure, you make the wild spaces less wild, threatening ecology again.

The first step of management is always measurement. That is why my colleagues and I develop better ways to count visitors to natural areas. Parks need a clear idea of how many visitors they receive, where those visitors go and when they are the most crowded to understand where to build facilities or deploy rangers and where to leave things as pristine as possible.

Q: You recently received a grant from the National Park Foundation to work with four national parks. Why do these parks need assistance to understand visitor behavior?

Pan: With the new grant, we will be conducting work in the Big Cypress National Preserve, Minute Man National Historical Park, the National Mall and Memorial Parks and Point Reyes National Seashore, all of which are administered by the National Park Service.

None of these parks have a single controlled entrance. You can enter them all from multiple directions, which makes it difficult to accurately assess how many visitors use the park. But by law, all national parks must report how many people they serve. This information is used to determine the amount of federal funding each park receives.

That’s where our team comes in. I am working with Derrick Taff; Suzie and Allen Martin Professor of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management and former park ranger; and Ravindra Tripathi, a post-doctoral scholar co-funded by the College of Information Sciences and Technology and our department, who has expertise in big data analytics. We are using location data from people’s cellphones to determine how many people visit the park as well as when and where the park is busiest.

Q: How will this research help improve visitor flow in these parks?

Pan: When parks have an accurate idea of visitor levels, they can deploy park rangers, portable toilets or any other resource more effectively, helping to protect the local environment while ensuring a smoother experience and fewer delays for visitors.

Our ultimate goal is to predict visitor traffic at these four parks on any given day based on park visit history, day of the week, weather forecast and local events. Rather than counting vehicles and estimating people — which is how most parks measure visitor numbers — we will use cellphone data, which is more nuanced and accurate in spatial distribution. We will validate the cellphone data by visiting the parks, verifying the big data with counts on the ground and interviewing rangers about visitor trends.

In the future, we hope to inform visitors when the most popular attractions are the busiest — like Google Maps does — so that people can naturally distribute their visits more evenly throughout the day, reducing the worst overcrowding in parks.

Q: Are there any privacy concerns with this work because you are using cell phone data?

Pan: There are always privacy concerns. However, by the time the data reaches us, phone numbers and their unique IDs have been removed, and the GPS data is distorted slightly, so it doesn’t provide exact addresses. These and other protections conform to all state and national customer privacy laws.

Q: Do bigger crowds undermine the point of visiting national parks in the first place?

Pan: The crowds do not necessarily make the experience worse. As people, we are not always seeking the same experiences. Some nights, you might want to curl up alone on your couch to watch a movie with no distractions. On other nights, you might want to visit the theater on opening night to share laughter and excitement with a large group of people.

In the United States, we tend to hold onto the fantasy of being alone in the wilderness, and that can be deeply meaningful. Hiking a trail through pristine wilderness is unique. If you want solitude, you need to plan ahead and visit less traveled parks, forests or wilderness areas.

On the other hand, Old Faithful — the famous geyser in Yellowstone National Park — is always crowded, but that is part of joy. It is awesome to experience nature’s majesty with other people. It can feel like a shared, sacred experience.

While it can be easy to see other people at the park as "other" — as competition for the best spots or as intruders in our experience — national parks belong to all citizens. If you view other people as part of the experience, not as a barrier between you and nature, it can connect you to others in a way that is as beautiful as the parks themselves.