Social media provide a wealth of behavioral data that can be used to investigate the provision of environmental services. In this study, the preferences revealed by photo-sharing social media users are analyzed through travel cost modeling to infer the monetary value of recreation in 115 man-made wetland ecosystems. Photographs’ metadata and other publicly available information are used to determine the frequency of recreational trips and the home location of visitors. The mean willingness to pay for access to 115 wetlands is found to range between $5.3 and $374 (2015 international $). The comparison of estimated recreational benefits with the capital, operation and maintenance costs of 74 wetlands reveals that such benefits are considerable and should be taken into account in the design and management of these systems. The approach demonstrates the potential for ecosystem service valuation techniques to incorporate the large amounts of behavioral data available from online resources.

社交媒体提供了大量的行为数据，可用于调查环境服务的提供。在这项研究中，通过旅行成本模型分析了照片共享社交媒体用户所揭示的偏好，以推断115个人工湿地生态系统中休闲的货币价值。照片的元数据和其他可公开获得的信息用于确定休闲旅行的频率和访客的住所。发现进入115个湿地的平均支付意愿为5.3美元至374美元（2015年国际美元）。将估计的娱乐收益与74个湿地的资本，运营和维护成本进行比较后发现，这些收益是相当可观的，在设计和管理这些系统时应予以考虑。