From sunrise to sunset: Exploring landscape preference through global reactions to ephemeral events captured in georeferenced social media

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE From sunrise to sunset: Exploring landscape preference through global reactions to ephemeral events captured in georeferenced social media Alexander Dunkel ID1*, Maximilian C. Hartmann2, Eva Hauthal1, Dirk Burghardt ID1, Ross S. Purves ID2 1 Institute of Cartography, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany, 2 Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Dunkel A, Hartmann MC, Hauthal E, Burghardt D, Purves RS (2023) From sunrise to sunset: Exploring landscape preference through global reactions to ephemeral events captured in georeferenced social media. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0280423. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0280423 Editor: Jacinto Estima, University of Coimbra Faculty of Sciences and Technology: Universidade de Coimbra Faculdade de Ciencias e Tecnologia, PORTUGAL Received: June 10, 2022 Accepted: January 2, 2023 Published: February 22, 2023 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280423 Copyright: © 2023 Dunkel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. * Abstract Events profoundly influence human-environment interactions. Through repetition, some events manifest and amplify collective behavioral traits, which significantly affects landscapes and their use, meaning, and value. However, the majority of research on reaction to events focuses on case studies, based on spatial subsets of data. This makes it difficult to put observations into context and to isolate sources of noise or bias found in data. As a result, inclusion of perceived aesthetic values, for example, in cultural ecosystem services, as a means to protect and develop landscapes, remains problematic. In this work, we focus on human behavior worldwide by exploring global reactions to sunset and sunrise using two datasets collected from Instagram and Flickr. By focusing on the consistency and reproducibility of results across these datasets, our goal is to contribute to the development of more robust methods for identifying landscape preference using geo-social media data, while also exploring motivations for photographing these particular events. Based on a four facet context model, reactions to sunset and sunrise are explored for Where, Who, What, and When. We further compare reactions across different groups, with the aim of quantifying differences in behavior and information spread. Our results suggest that a balanced assessment of landscape preference across different regions and datasets is possible, which strengthens representativity and exploring the How and Why in particular event contexts. The process of analysis is fully documented, allowing transparent replication and adoption to other events or datasets. 1. Introduction Sunset and sunrise are witnessed and appreciated daily by countless people around the world. The timing and visibility of these ubiquitous events varies according to a host of local anthropogenic and natural environmental factors, including weather, pollution, topography PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280423 February 22, 2023 1 / 22 PLOS ONE Data Availability Statement: All HyperLogLog data used to produce figures and results in this work (see code Supporting information S1–S9) is made available in a public data repository https://doi.org/ 10.25532/OPARA-200. Funding: This work was supported by the German Research Foundation as part of the priority programme ‘Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualisation and Social Computing’ (VGIscience, SPP 1894) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project No 200021E-186389). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. From sunrise to sunset: Exploring landscape preference through georeferenced social media and the built environment. Sunsets and sunrises are valued in many cultures through ceremonies, storytelling and art, and often linked to landscape appreciation through paintings and photographs (c.f. [1]). In this paper we take advantage of social media manifestations of this phenomena to explore global patterns using millions of photographs and their descriptions. The rationale for choosing this event is twofold. Firstly, there is a general lack of reproducibility in studies of behavior using social media because samples, population and the phenomena under observations change between studies [2]. This means that methods and results of case studies are difficult to generalize more broadly. For this reason, we chose an event type with a strong temporal and spatial consistency. Sunset and sunrise were among the few events fulfilling these criteria. Secondly, while the use of geo-social media has rapidly increased in recent years, there is a lack of validation of transferability for methods allowing robust identification of value or worth [3]. This issue is commonly known as results reproducibility. Improving results reproducibility ideally requires an experiment with two maximally separated datasets and “finding relationships in the same direction and at similar strength” [3 p38] in both. This is difficult to implement with more ‘newsworthy’ topics. The consistent global and long-term footprint of the sunset and sunrise let us maximize sample size while simultaneously providing a basis for reproducing results using two datasets, albeit not universally representative but independent, collected from Instagram and Flickr. Importantly, the subject of this study is not simply one of abstract interest. Understanding what is collectively valued where, by whom and when is important because an equitable society should take into account diverse ways of perceiving, valuing and appreciating the world [4]. Indeed, as we grapple with the challenge of developing indicators measuring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, the importance of capturing this diversity becomes more apparent (un.org/sustainabledevelopment). In natural resource management, planners require information about the spatial distribution and relative importance of collective values related to the landscape, in order to plan and manage scarce resources, for example by identifying regions under pressure, designating protected areas or channeling visitor flows. A common term to refer to these values in natural resource management is ‘landscape preference’, relat (...truncated)