The chapter brings out a brief note on the tourist attractions, hotels and lodges, NGOs/travel agencies operating in that region, railway/bus stations, land use profile, etc. in the Sundarban area of West Bengal in conjunction with exploring the potential of ecotourism using GIS and some secondary source data. Moving onto the analysis part, by making use of geo-spatial data, the attributes of ecotourism potential in the Sundarbans has been explored. The author makes use of the Euclidean distance mechanism and principal component analysis to rank the ecotourism sites in Sunderbans (i.e., based on the construction of ecotourism potential index [EPI]). The novelty of the chapter lies in comparing the ranks obtained by constructing the EPI following the principal component analysis and the Euclidean distance function. It needs to be mentioned here that these tourist spots have been selected based on the information collected on the inflow of both domestic and foreign tourists to these spots. The chapter concludes by discussing the future scope of research in this regard.
Regularized Principal Component Analysis for Spatial Data
