Carl Lehto

Outdoor recreation has positive effects on human well-being and health. There is a renewed focus on how to ensure that the natural and cultural landscape can produce sufficient recreational opportunities. My PhD project is about outdoor recreation and what types of landscapes that people prefer. I use GIS and machine learning models to analyze spatial datasets of where people have performed recreation, in order to find which landscape characteristics (such as land cover composition & heterogeneity, topology, infrastructure etc.) matter when it comes to which areas are used for recreation. I hope that my research will be able to be applied in landscape planning, to help guide physical planners on which areas might be important for different kinds of outdoor recreation.