Discourse about national parks on social media: Insights from Twitter

Engagement with natural areas is evident in a range of discourses including on social media. Expanding on more locally focused research, we examine the potential of listening into Twitter to provide insights for national parks including who tweets, about which parks and about what, using a quantitative (culturomics) analysis approach. In six months, more than two million tweets were sent about 'national parks', and 264 national parks had more than 100 tweets. Most of the tweets were about USA national parks (62.5%) and most were sent by North Americans (59.4%) or Europeans (18.0%). Those tweeting often referred to specific events, landscapes, tourism and/or management in the tweets, and often tweeted about their domestic national parks. The relative popularity of national parks on Twitter was similar to relative visitation. Therefore, Twitter provided insights for assessing some types of public engagement covering hundreds of national parks, but limitations include missing voices, languages and places, as well as volatiltiy in platforms ongoing challenges for research and monitoring using social media.