Coral reefs and coastal tourism in Hawaii

Coral reefs are popular for their vibrant biodiversity. By combining Web-scraped Instagram data from tourists and high-resolution live coral cover maps in Hawaii, we find that, regionally, coral reefs both attract and suffer from coastal tourism. Higher live coral cover attracts reef visitors, but that visitation contributes to subsequent reef degradation. Such feedback loops threaten the highest-quality reefs, highlighting both their economic value and the need for effective conservation management. This repository contains the raw Instagram post data used to run these analyses as well as the Python script used to generate this dataset. The base Python script was adapted from code written by Zoe Volenec.