Analysing and aggregating visitor tracks in a protected area

The advent of location-based technologies deployed in protected areas provides both visitors and managers of such areas with new opportunities. In this paper we investigate the potential for mining individual tracks of visitors’ geospatial lifelines to both extract information describing aggregated patterns of group behaviour and characterise individual actions. Methods to spatio-temporally cluster individual behaviour and identify potential locations for specific actions (e.g. do visitors stop here to look at wildlife), whilst handling uncertainty in location, are described and applied to test the hypotheses that firstly, visitor behaviour is altered by the provision of information, and secondly whether the mode of information provision (e.g. in the form of a paper map or though an location-based service) influences visitor behaviour. The results of experiments with 140 visitors to a nature trail on the island of Texel in the Netherlands show statistically significant differences in time spent at locations where information was “pushed” to the visitors.