Integrating social media and field investigations to monitor contaminated sites
2022
Jiang, Yefeng | Shi, Zhou | Xia, Fang | Xu, Zhe
Field investigations can be used to accurately monitor contaminated sites; however, their high cost makes it impossible to realise real-time monitoring over a large area (e.g. on a national scale). Although the use of social media enables the large-scale, real-time, and low-cost monitoring of contaminated sites, its effectiveness is flawed. In this study, we propose a novel framework by integrating field investigations and social media data to monitor contaminated sites, using China as an example. Our analyses indicated that the number of positive, negative, and neutral tweets posted by social media users accounted for 38.8%, 57.5%, and 3.7% of the study area, respectively, exhibiting a positive trend over time in different provinces. The number of user tweets and contaminated sites indicates similar trends, and there is significant spatial agglomeration between the two datasets; the former can explain 36.2% of the difference among different provinces in the latter. Additionally, when the number of user tweets increased by one, the mean number of potentially contaminated sites increased by 0.38. In cities, after major contaminated site incidents, the number of user tweets and negative sentiments significantly increased. The present results suggest that social media and field investigations complement each other and can provide support for the real-time monitoring of contaminated sites on a global scale in the future.
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