Social media images from Peneda-Gerês National Park, Northern Portugal

This dataset contains images from the Peneda-Gerês National Park, Northern Portugal. The images were collected from the Flickr and Wikiloc platforms considering a time period from 2003 to 2017. In respect to the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679, social media data protected by users’ rights was not downloaded nor analysed. Public data that would potentially contain personal information from social media users was kept anonymous through the study. Data was retrieved through the use of the freely available Flickr’s Application Programming Interface (API), indicating a time window and a bounding box with a pair of coordinates (in our case: minimum latitude: 41.653104; maximum lat.: 42.083595; min. longitude: -8.426270; max. lon.: -7.754076) around Peneda-Gerês. This information was then saved as an excel file with the following attributes: user-id, date taken, latitude, longitude, picture uniform resource locator (url). A first annotation, in the context of cultural ecosystem services (CES), was performed by dividing the photographs of the dataset into “Indoor” and “Outdoor” classes. Only the “Outdoor” pictures were included in this study, since CES are directly connected to nature and environment, which in turn are related to the outside/outdoor. The “Outdoor” images were further divided into two main classes, “Natural” and “Human”, depending on whether the image was dominated by natural or man-made elements. Lastly, a finer annotation for outdoor images was also provided, which encompasses the following six classes: “Species”, “Landscape”, “Nature”, “Human activities”, “Human structures” and “Posing”. “Species” pictures respectively pertained to close-up shots of animals or plants in the wild, translating CES pertaining to biodiversity appreciation. “Landscape” pictures show wide-open shots of nature in the wild, often with a visible horizon most often representing people’s enjoyment of landscape aesthetics. “Human activities” include pictures where people engage in by recreational activities, for instance related to sports such as ski or cycling. “Human structures” include those pictures where man-made structures dominate in the wild, e.g., historical monuments and churches, capturing situations of cultural heritage and spiritual enrichment. “Posing” refers to pictures with people looking at the camera, with recognizable faces, testifying social enjoyment and sense of identity. Finally, “Nature” pictures capture natural elements with no particular feature (such as species) but with an intermediate shot (differing from wide-open shots attributed to landscapes), expressing the appreciation of nature by people.