Gateway and natural amenity regions (GNAR) throughout the Western U.S. are facing a number of unprecedented challenges that threaten their economies, the wellbeing of their residents, and the health of tourists who flock to these areas for recreation and rejuvenation. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to virulent concerns amongst gateway community leaders about tourists spreading the virus, harming local residents, and overwhelming these communities’ limited healthcare resources. With local economies that depend on the flow of outdoor recreationists and tourists, the disruption of those flows can have immediate and disastrous consequences for communities in GNARs. This project's research team brings together expertise from the social and spatial sciences capable of transforming the way GNAR communities across the Western U.S. plan for and respond to interruptions in the flow of tourists brought about by natural disasters and crisis events like the COVID-19 pandemic. The vision is to develop predictive models of tourism flows and a respective decision support system that GNAR communities can use to explore and inform local policy decisions. This project will be integrating publicly available mobility data into an interactive tourism planning and management tool, rapidly accelerating the ability of these data to be used by GNAR communities in their efforts to plan for and manage tourism during natural disasters and crisis events. By leveraging an established research team with demonstrated experience integrating disparate datasets to quantify the volume and spatial distribution of tourism flows across large geographic scales, this project's data and models are ready to be piloted with willing GNAR communities throughout San Juan County, Utah – home to Navajo tribal lands and over a dozen small communities which are heavily reliant on tourism.
By utilizing an inclusive engagement approach to develop a web-based decision support system, this project will bring new insights into the efficacy of co-producing knowledge and understanding through smart and connected technologies. The project will also advance our understanding of effective data visualization using free and open source web mapping approaches; and provide new knowledge on resilience indicators for GNARs throughout the Western U.S. These insights can be used to improve approaches to civic engagement in the context of complex feedbacks from natural hazards and other crisis events on local economies.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
