Classification of Recreation Opportunity Spectrum Using Night Lights for Evidence of Humans and POI Data for Social Setting

The recreation opportunity spectrum (ROS) has been widely recognized as an effective tool for the inventory and planning of outdoor recreational resources. However, its applications have been primarily focused on forest-dominated settings with few studies being conducted on all land types at a regional scale. The creation of a ROS is based on physical, social, and managerial settings, with the physical setting being measured by three criteria: remoteness, size, and evidence of humans. One challenge to extending the ROS to all land types on a large scale is the difficulty of quantifying the evidence of humans and social settings. Thus, this study, for the first time, developed an innovative approach that used night lights as a proxy for evidence of humans and points of interest (POI) for social settings to generate an automatic ROS for Hunan Province using Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial analysis. The whole province was classified as primitive (2.51%), semi-primitive non-motorized (21.33%), semi-primitive motorized (38.60%), semi-developed natural (30.99%), developed natural (5.61%), and highly developed (0.96%), which was further divided into three subclasses: large-natural (0.63%), small natural (0.27%), and facilities (0.06%). In order to implement the management and utilization of natural recreational resources in Hunan Province at the county (city, district) level, the province’s 122 counties (cities, districts) were categorized into five levels based on the ROS factor dominance calculated at the county and provincial levels. These five levels include key natural recreational counties (cities, districts), general natural recreational counties (cities, districts), rural counties (cities, districts), general metropolitan counties (cities, districts), and key metropolitan counties (cities, districts), with the corresponding numbers being 8, 21, 50, 24, and 19, respectively.

Oportunidades de visitação oferecidas em Áreas Naturais Protegidas: análise dos Parques Nacionais mais visitados no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos das América em 2017

Parques Nacionais (PN) são estratégias de proteção da natureza e realização da atividade turística que demandam ferramentas para visitação adequada. Com o avanço do turismo nestas áreas, os PN assumem dupla responsabilidade: manter a qualidade da experiência dos visitantes e contribuir com todo seu potencial para sociedade. Nesse sentido, a ferramenta Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) categoriza as denominadas “Oportunidades de Visitação” em diferentes classes (Prístina, Primitiva, Natural, Rural e Urbana) para identificar atributos específicos para cada ambiente e público, organizando o turismo. Neste cenário, o objetivo foi analisar as oportunidades oferecidas em 10 Parques Nacionais, cinco no Brasil e cinco nos Estados Unidos da América e entender como as diferentes Classes de Oportunidades podem influenciar a visitação turística. Os dados foram obtidos a partir de pesquisa bibliográfica e documental. Identificado os potenciais turísticos de cada PN, aplicou-se a metodologia ROS. Os resultados mostraram que existe relação entre o número de oportunidades oferecidas e o número de visitantes que o Parque Nacional recebe, confirmando o pressuposto que, tanto nos Parques brasileiros quanto estadunidenses, diferentes oportunidades recreativas relaciona-se ao maior número visitantes. Dessa forma, a ferramenta Recreation Opportunity Spectrum apresenta-se como importante ferramenta de gestão da visitação turística. A possibilidade de criar classes de visitação em áreas naturais deve ser amplamente utilizada para garantir o turismo sustentável.

Mapping the natural heritage as a source of recreation services at national scale in Bulgaria

Natural heritage includes natural features or natural areas of outstanding universal value. At a national level, this value refers to the importance of ecosystems which can be considered as the spatial units representing the natural heritage of the particular area in terms of their values to people. Nature-based outdoor recreation represents an important service that interests millions of people and contributes to connecting them to nature, but it may also cause negative impacts in the form of pollution, erosion and habitats loss. We apply the ESTIMAP recreation model which provides a framework for a spatially-explicit assessment of local outdoor recreation and use it to identify and assess the natural heritage as a source of recreation services at a national level in Bulgaria. At the first stage of the study, we identify the natural heritage and the data sources to represent it in a spatially-explicit way. Then, we apply the module for recreation potential to assess the potential of the natural heritage to provide a recreation ecosystem service. At the third stage, the accessibility of the natural heritage is assessed in order to specify how the potential identified at the previous step can be really used. Finally, the recreation potential and accessibility are integrated into the recreation opportunity spectrum in order to develop the maps representing the ecosystem service supply provided by the natural heritage. The results are presented in form of a recreation potential map that reveals the capacity of natural heritage to provide the recreation potential, map of the accessibility of the natural heritage and map of the recreation opportunity spectrum representing the combination between the first two maps. The maps will be used for the development of an innovative geospatial platform designed to facilitate the access of the Bulgarian natural heritage to the European common knowledge and innovation markets. The results on the accessibility and recreation opportunity spectrum contribute to the development of the model in areas which were not covered by previous applications at the EU scale.