How Do We Use Our Coasts?
Advances in mobile technology provide insight into patterns of use along the shores of the Narragansett Bay region
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Our region sees visits from local, regional, national, and even international origins. Where do folks come from?
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When a phone pings at one of the coastal sites in our region, we can use the home location of the device—anonymized to the general area—to get a sense of where folks traveled from.
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When a place sees a lot of visitors, it tells us people like to go there. For the activities. For the scenery. For the local charm. For meaning or significance of that place.
The more time and money people spend to visit a place, the more we know that place has value to the community.
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Mobile data can tell us how people use and value different areas. Let's see what kinds of spots attract visits.
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From the shores of the Atlantic to our upriver cities—does the condition of the environment impact where people visit?
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We think this information could be useful to you, so we're making it freely available.
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Who might use coastal public access visitation data? Both community residents and a range of stakeholders might use this information to support planning, grant writing, community awareness efforts, research, management and policy decisions, and other purposes.
How do I get visitation numbers? Extract visitation counts directly from this StoryMap for any coastal site or set of sites. In the Site Viewer, click site markers to view information in a pop-up box. Alternatively, download the Excel table or the GIS datasets for annual (summer 2019) or monthly (June, July, August, September) visitation totals.
Where can I download visitation data for the region? Data downloads are publicly available at the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program GIS Data Hub (links below). All datasets contain the same visitation and site attributes.
- Excel Dataset (List of Coastal Sites and Attributes)
- GIS Point Dataset (Coastal Site Locations and Attributes)
- GIS Polygon Dataset (Coastal Site Boundaries and Attributes)
How can I get my hands on visitor origin layers? Layers such as those in the Visitor Origins maps can be produced for any site or group of sites in this dataset. Get in touch with the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program if you are interested in origin layers.
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Coast
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Visit Our Coast
Want to visit our coasts? Check out these great coastal public access guides:
Methods
Take a deep dive into our methods...
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Methods
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development (ORD) Atlantic Coastal Environmental Sciences Division (ACESD) obtained anonymous cell phone-based visitation data from Airsage, Inc. for public coastal access sites in the Narragansett Bay region, which supported this collaboration with the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program. Learn more about data privacy at Airsage here . Cell phone data was anonymized and aggregated prior to purchase, meaning that researchers work with simple counts and cannot see individual phones, location history, or personal information.
Coastal sites (mobile device "destinations") were derived from coastal public access datasets sourced from Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (MA CZM) Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP), and Rhode Island Geographic Information System (RIGIS). Some public access points represented in source datasets were combined within the boundaries of a larger site polygon, therefore this dataset lists fewer total public coastal access points than the source datasets, although all are represented. Undocumented public coastal access and private coastal access are not represented in this dataset.
We relied on information available in the source datasets to classify each site according to several common types/uses, including public beach; swimming (includes public beaches and other swimming sites); boating (launches, wharfs, marinas, docks, ramps, put-ins); fishing, crabbing, or shellfishing access; general outdoor (parks, scenic areas, vistas/overlooks, trails, coastal walks, picnic areas, etc.); and public rights-of-way or paths to the shore. The full range of site uses at any given site may not be captured by this dataset. Each site is often used multiple ways. A visitor to Conimicut Point, for example, might swim at the beach—or they might use to site to fish, walk the trails, have a picnic, and more. A single site may be represented in multiple pie charts in the Coastal Uses section.
Site polygons were delineated by EPA ORD ACESD scientists using satellite imagery to determine the boundaries around existing public coastal access sites. Delineating the boundaries of a coastal access site is required for tabulating cell phone "pings" that occur within those boundaries. It is a process that is inherently a bit tricky as site boundaries do not typically exist in reality, and moreover, it can be difficult to exclude other visited features, like roads and buildings. Beaches and known larger access points were digitized by hand using satellite imagery to capture parking lots and the most visually logical boundaries of the site using online searches, pictures and local knowledge. All other smaller sites that were point features in GIS data were delineated using 100-meter buffers and then verified and adjusted by hand.
Visits were counted if the visitor's cell phone pinged within site boundaries in June through September 2019 between 8am - 6pm. Cell phone location data is not continuous, and the frequency of "pings" is dependent on how a user interacts with their cell phone. For this dataset, the behavior of the devices had to imply an activity point—a destination that was not also their work or home location—to be counted. Devices just traveling through, say on a road, were not counted. Airsage provides corrected mobile location data using proprietary algorithms to adjust for variables such as home locations within site boundaries, the ratio of cell phones in their sample to people in an origin geography, user habits, and more. All visitation data were further corrected to our region by EPA ORD ACESD researchers using actual counts made at Narragansett Town Beach, where visitors are tabulated as they walk on the beach. These methods result in conservative counts, and are covered in more detail in Merrill et al. 2020 along with a discussion of accuracy. There are uncertainties in the on-the-ground visitation counts we used to scale the cell data to beach visitation as well as in the cell data methods. As more accurate daily observational counts are conducted at coastal access points and incorporated the methods, accuracy may improve.
Each cell phone ping is associated with the device's home location, determined by the user’s behavior over the course of each month. Prior to purchase, Airsage strips identifying information and replaces the home location with the U.S. Census block group (mobile device "origin"), each identified with a Census Geographic Identifier (GEOID) code. Visitation data is then purchased with visitation information presented in 1-hour chunks for every possible origin-destination pair and the count of visitors by origin presented for each month. We engineered these data to make it accessible to you in a summarized form for each coastal public access site. Visitation data is available by month (June, July, August, September) and in total for the summer of 2019.
Tabulated visits are to designated public access only, which produces a conservative total estimate for the region that does not include undocumented, locally-known places to access to coast. As reference point, Airsage mobile data, corrected by EPA ORD ACESD, captured 7.5 million visits through public access points on Cape Cod in 2016. This StoryMap does not cover visits to Block Island; however, data for those sites are available in the downloadable datasets.
