Social media for landscape planning and design: a review and discussion

This report systematically reviews the academic literature on social media’s applications in landscape planning and design. As an emerging data source, social media help overcome the limitations associated with traditional datasets that focus primarily on environmental information; they explicitly or implicitly reveal important information concerning human behaviours, landscape values, and landscape perceptions. Key findings include: (1) social media data can be valid proxies for data collected from traditional methods, while presenting advantages of cost and time savings, and capturing the intangible and subjective dimension of cultural ecosystem services; (2) geospatial location, text information, and photo content are the primary data parameters in use; and (3) most studies currently focus on large/regional-scale, nonurban areas. We further identified four themes that characterise the current stage of social media applications. Challenges and prospects of social media in landscape studies are also discussed.