Location-based games provide an opportunity to collect crowdsourced, spatially explicit data that can be used in decision-making processes in forest planning. While these games have been more widely used in collecting mapping and modelling data, there is limited research on their suitability for collecting location-based data on human preferences, opinions, and emotions in these contexts. Collecting human-centred data can be resource-intensive and costly, hence exploring the potential of location-based games is important. This study investigates the use of geocaching in gathering meaningful data in urban and rural settings. A methodology was developed wherein surveys were embedded in geocaches on trails located in urban and rural forests in Finland. These surveys collected quantitative, qualitative, and photographic data relating to human-forest relationships and landscape preferences. The findings indicate that trails closer to urban areas with higher population density showed increased cache log volume and survey response rates. Moreover, trails tended to collect most information in the first summer after establishment. It is recommended that future studies employing this methodology create shorter, easily accessible, circular trails and that survey questions should be clear and incorporate a method to verify that submitted responses reflect experiences at the chosen location. Furthermore, forest planning professionals and researchers seeking to utilise location-based games in data collection are advised to engage with the communities active in playing them to ensure success..

中文翻译：

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使用基于位置的游戏收集城市和农村森林规划的偏好信息


基于位置的游戏提供了收集众包空间显式数据的机会，这些数据可用于森林规划中的决策过程。虽然这些游戏更广泛地用于收集地图和建模数据，但关于它们是否适合在这些环境中收集有关人类偏好、意见和情感的基于位置的数据的研究有限。收集以人为本的数据可能是资源密集型且成本高昂的，因此探索基于位置的游戏的潜力非常重要。本研究调查了在城市和农村环境中使用地理藏宝收集有意义的数据。开发了一种方法，其中将调查嵌入位于芬兰城市和乡村森林的小径上的藏宝点中。这些调查收集了与人类与森林关系和景观偏好相关的定量、定性和摄影数据。研究结果表明，靠近人口密度较高的城市地区的步道显示出缓存日志量和调查响应率的增加。此外，步道往往在建立后的第一个夏天收集大部分信息。建议采用这种方法的未来研究创建更短、易于访问的圆形小径，并且调查问题应该清晰，并包含一种方法来验证提交的回答是否反映了所选地点的经历。此外，寻求利用基于位置的游戏进行数据收集的森林规划专业人士和研究人员建议与积极参与游戏的社区进行互动，以确保成功。