Interesting Link: iNaturalist map data sorted by "Locals" and "Tourists"
This website takes iNaturalist data and tries to identify which observations were made by people visiting from elsewhere. (I wrote about what iNaturalist is recently here.) This allows you to see which natural places are heavily documented by local citizen-scientists, vs. which places may be hotspots for ecotourism.
Purple are locals, orange are tourists... this screenshot makes it clear that the vast majority of people using iNaturalist in the Los Angeles area are locals documenting their home. There's one giant center of tourist observations on, specifically, Corona Del Mar State Beach down by Newport Beach. That is so strange and odd that it makes me wonder if one person has seriously warped the observation density down there.
This blog post from the site's creator goes over the rules used to categorize observations. If you post somewhere for more than 30 days, you're supposed to be counted as a local.
It also shows some fascinating shots of different places where locals and tourists are observing nature very differently from one another. Marin County and the SF bay area features tourists along the coastline and in ecotourism places like Muir Woods... while locals observe nature very heavily along inland roadways.
Here's a place I noticed for myself: Raleigh/Durham, full of locals, vs coastal North Carolina, which is almost solely tourists:
Here's a screenshot of the area around Anchorange, Alaska, showing the routes tourists use to explore the nearby wilderness:
The distribution differences between tourists and locals in Aotearoa New Zealand are also extremely intense:
Check out where you live! I think the things you notice will be largely unremarkable, but I was definitely surprised by the huge density of observations new Newport Beach in the LA area.