  The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic recession negatively
affected many people's physical, social, and psychological health and has been
shown to change population-level mobility, but little attention has been given
to park visitations as an indicator. Estimating the frequency of park
visitations from aggregated mobility data of all the parks in Washington State
(USA), we study trends in park use one year prior to and two years during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that the gravity model is a robust
model for the park visitation behavior in different spatial resolutions of city
level and state level and different socio-economical classes. Incorporating
network structure, our detailed analysis highlights that high-income level
residents changed their recreational behavior by visiting their local parks
more and a broader recreational options outside of their local census area;
whereas the low-income residents changed their visitation behavior by reducing
their recreational choices.
