Quantifying tourism booms and the increasing footprint in the Arctic with social media data

摘要: Arctic tourism has rapidly increased in the past two decades. We used social media data to examine localized booms and quantify spatial expansion of footprint. extracted geotagged locations from over 800,000 photos on Flickr mapped these across space time. critically use as a source data-poor regions, find that while is not suitable an early warning system growth less visited parts world, it can be map changes at large scales. Our results show footprint summer quadrupled winter by 600% between 2006 2016, although areas remain untouched tourism. This rapid increase raises concerns about impacts sustainability ecosystems communities. boom set continue, new are being opened melting sea ice, airports continued promotion 'last chance see' destination. societies face complex decisions whether this ongoing socially environmentally sustainable.