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New York Recreation Information Tracker (RecIT-NY)

Apr 1, 2019

Stone developed two applications for gathering recreational use and conditions data from recreators in New York State. Together, the applications provide OPD with historically difficult to capture recreational use data and helps the State identify opportunities for increasing access to recreational activities, as well as an opportunity to obtain user feedback on existing recreational opportunities/venues. With these apps, New Yorkers have the ability to discover new areas similar to ones they like, explore things they haven’t experienced, provide feedback, and stay away from heavy use areas and select alternate location.

The first tool for capturing recreational data is a downloadable, mobile application that is contributed to, and populated by, recreation users in New York. Within the Esri Crowdsource app, users can to tag their location and fill out a short survey regarding their recreation activity and experience and upload images and videos. The second data collection tool is focused on harvesting location and attitude (“mood”) data from public social media posts on Facebook and Instagram. Using APIs, the application collects information about recreational sites from social media, including relevant ratings, number of ‘raters’, number of likes, number of followers, number of visits, number of new posts in past week. This app uses a python script to capture this data, which is then displayed within a “Mood” map viewer on the site.