The advent of Web 2.0 and the growth of social media platforms have fostered an environment for the documentation and sharing of landscape imagery. In addition to looking at the site scale, using these big data allows for visual landscape assessment at the regional scale. The onset of Marcellus shale gas development in the state of Pennsylvania concurrent with the rapidly widening availability of crowd-sourced citizen photography has provided a valuable opportunity to study crowdsourced and georeferenced photography as an aid in visual resource conservation design and planning. As Trombulak and Baldwin (2010) outline, the goals for this work include identifying spatially explicit measures of change in the landscape, being able to predict spatially explicit threats to the landscape, recognizing sites within the region that are important or irreplaceable, and prioritizing areas for conservation action to address pressures and preserve/conserve exceptional sites in the future.
