Understanding sentiment of national park visitors from social media data

National parks are key for conserving biodiversity and supporting people´s well-being. However, anthropogenic pressures challenge the existence of national parks and their conservation effectiveness. Therefore, it is crucial to assess how people perceive national parks in order to enhance socio-political support for conservation. User-generated data shared by visitors on social media provide opportunities to understand how people perceive (e.g. preferences, feelings, opinions) national parks during nature-based recreational experiences. In this study, we applied methods from automated natural language processing to assess visitors’ sentiment when describing experiences in Instagram posts geolocated inside four national parks in South Africa. We found that visitors’ sentiment was positive, and mostly included emotions such as joy, anticipation, trust and surprise, with only a small occurrence of posts with negative feelings. Appreciation of nature, in association with a diverse set of ot...