GIS IN NATURAL AREA TOURISM

The Use of GIS in Natural Area Tourism



The Use of GIS in Natural Area Tourism

The use of GIS in Natural Area Tourism

This review provides a discussion of the benefits' and side effect of tourism industry, Geography information system (GIS), Nature based tourism, the application of the use GIS for tourism planning and benefits and limitation of GIS in tourism industry.

The world tourism organisation (WTO) estimated to the increasing of the tourist arrivals in 2020 that will reach to 1.6 billion worldwide, and tourism will receipts more than US $2 trillion (WTO, 2000). However, the increasing of the profits of mass tourism over the last 50 years has happened with less concern of natural environmental or cultural sites (McAdam, 1999). Despite the potential positive effects of tourism, activated local economics attract capitalism and jobs to the country site communities (Tarrant, 2001). In contrast, tourism has also side effects for nature area for instance; hiking, climbing or horse rising, and could create various negative impact on the surrounding environment (Bunruamkaew & Murayama, 2012; Catherine Marina Pickering, 2009). In addition, the used land could be change toward artificial uses and a massive tourist pressure (Rodriguez-Rodriguez, 2012).

Nature Area Tourism

Natural Area Tourism offers a broad description of tourism in the natural areas and allows the readers to comprehend the range of difficulties and possibilities of having successful developments of tourism in the natural areas (Newsome 2012, 90). However, “the term Nature-area tourism refer to it is one of alternative tourism is natural area tourism, that is, tourism in natural settings” for example, Nature based tourism, in which viewing natura is the primary objective, can experience nature places. Theses can have a wide range of activity form bushwalking, sightseeing, scenic driving, beach experiences, wildlife viewing, topography, water ways and vegetation (Azizan, Abdul Aziz, Badaruddin, Abdul Ghapar, & Ahmad Puad, 2011). However, Hvenegaard (1994) has described the positive effect of tourism. Also, there are an adverse of environmental impacts such as overcrowding, overdevelopment un-regarded recreations, pollution, wildlife disturbance, and vehicle use. Moreover, the increasing human interference in ecologically weak area could lead to changing in the ecological process (Bunruamkaew & Murayama, 2012).

Nowadays, increasing influx of tourists especially practice a activities such as hiking, climbing, horse riding and mountain biking leads to impact on vegetations, soil and creating informal trails (Catherine Marina Pickering, 2009). In addition, the land use could be change toward artificial uses and a massive tourist pressure (Rodriguez-Rodriguez, 2012) all this reasons due to nature based tourism focus in tourist demand rather than protect of tourist destination (Azizan, et al., 2011) lack of management skills, lack of community awareness' to deal with intensive flow tourist activities (Al-Shorman & Magablih, 2009).

GIS

The term Geography information system (Runnstorm MC & Olafsidttira R 2009) refer to the Information System (GIS) there is conventional definition worked cited in Burrough (1989) who defines GIS as “a powerful set of tools for collecting, storing, retrieving at will, transforming and displaying spatial data from the real ...