Overcrowding in national parks and protected areas can cause irreversible damage to the environment, compromising the quality of soil, water, wildlife, and vegetation. Thus, it is critical for park managers to have detailed information on visitor activities and spatial dynamics in order to prioritise actions capable of mitigating undesirable impacts in the most frequently visited areas. In this article, we use georeferenced trails and photographs from the Wikiloc and Flickr web platforms to determine the spatial visitation patterns in the Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park (AINP) from 2008 to 2023. Maps showing trail usage intensity and the distribution of photographs according to land use allowed us to identify the most frequented land uses by visitors and the areas of highest tourist pressure within the AINP. The results show that distribution patterns vary between platforms. Shrubland (37%) and marine cliffs (27%) were the most photographed land uses by visitors, while artificial areas (14%) were the most frequented by Wikiloc users. C & iacute;es island emerges as the most popular tourist destination, as evidenced by the greater number of trails and photographs compared to Ons, S & aacute;lvora, and Cortegada. This study shows how social media data, specifically trails and geotagged photographs from Wikiloc and Flickr, can support and complement the monitoring of visitor use and impact in protected areas.

Increasing air temperatures are driving widespread changes to Arctic vegetation. In the high Arctic, these changes are patchy and the causes of heterogeneity are not well understood. In this study, we explore the determinants of high Arctic vegetation change over the last three decades on Banks Island, Northwest Territories. We used Landsat imagery (1984-2014) to map long-term trends in vegetation productivity and regional spatial data to investigate the relationships between trends in productivity and terrain position. Field sampling investigated vegetation community composition in different habitat types. Our analysis shows that vegetation productivity changes are substantial on Banks Island, where productivity has increased across about 80% of the study area. Rising productivity levels can be attributed to increasing biomass of the plant communities in both upland and lowland habitats. Our analysis also shows that the magnitude of greening is mediated by terrain characteristics related to soil moisture. Shifts in tundra vegetation will impact wildlife habitat quality, surface energy balance, permafrost dynamics, and the carbon cycle; additional research is needed to explore the effects of more productive vegetation communities on these processes in the high Arctic.