Understanding where people live, how populations and visitors are distributed across space, and how these patterns shift over time is central to planning in an era of climate change, natural hazards, and mounting pressures on natural environments. This session focuses on data-driven approaches that connect advances in gridded population and socio-demographic datasets with the management of nature-based tourism and outdoor recreation across rural communities, destinations, and protected landscapes. Emphasis is placed on methodological progress in building, validating, and integrating spatial population and human-activity data—along with assessing spatial accuracy, uncertainty, and data fusion methods for future projections under alternative scenarios. The session also focuses on real-world applications that translate these data products into actionable planning and governance, including climate change adaptation, disaster risk management, sustainable land-use planning, and destination resilience. Key thematic areas include geoscience methods for tourism and recreation; the role of biodiversity, geodiversity, and ecosystem services; natural hazards and risk communication; strategic decision-making and stakeholder trust in data; participatory and citizen approaches; and the use of local knowledge to support sustainable development and mitigation. Overall, the session highlights how robust spatial evidence can support transparent, impactful decisions for communities and environments under uncertainty.