Human Mobility to Parks under COVID19 Pandemic and Wildfire Seasons in Western and Central United States

Parks is an essential element in the environment serve for people physical and mental wellbeing. Especially in 2020, people's health has suffered a great crisis under the dual effects of the COVID 19 pandemic and the extensive, severe wildfire in the western and center United State. People had changed their mobility to obtain the recreational opportunities. The parks offer more safer recreation opportunity for people to keep health during this crisis time. This research analyzes spatial and temporal variation on people’s mobility including number of visitors, dwell time, and travel distance to the park under the impact of confluence of two major crises. we applied Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) Models to explore how the COVID19 and wildfire factor affected on human recreation behaviors and visitations to parks during June – September 2020. The findings indicated that the overall trend of visitation for the park decrease under impact of COVID pandemic and wildfire. In addition, people tended to travel closer from home to parks and spend less time there when more COVID19 cases were reported. However, with the lifted stay-at-home restriction and national park reopen, people travel more distance to the national park (e.g., Yellowstone) under the COVID case peak in June 2020. Moreover, people shorten the time and traveled a long distance to park in the southwest of study area during non-wildfire season (June -July), and then to the whole study area during the wildfire season (August-September). These findings shed new light on the how human mobility to the park during the pandemic and wildfire crisis, which complements practical research on physical activity, ecosystem services, and public health.