A geospatial decision support system for ecotourism: a case study in the Campania region of Italy

Nowadays, the business of ecotourism and rural tourism is a very important activity for many inland areas,enabling them to both produce important income and sustain the rural economy. Moreover, sustainable tourismis included in the UN 17th Sustainable Development Goal, which is to be achieved by 2030 (SDG 8.9 and SDG12). Recent progress in digital tourism promises to deliver important changes to this activity, but most of thisprogress is addressed at well-known tourist destinations, so not dealing with the challenge of inland, rural andecotourism. It is within this framework that this paper attempts to demonstrate that a new type of geoSpatialDecision Support System (S-DSS), developed on a Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure (GCI) and with a substantialinterdisciplinary core, could provide a valuable web-based operational tool which may be offered to bothecotourism and rural tourism end-users, planners and policy makers, so that they might better plan and managethis type of sustainable tourism. The S-DSS platform has also been designed to encourage use by the multi-usercommunity (farmers, tourism enterprises, associations and public bodies). The methodology is linked to thecreation of a GCI platform (www.landsupport.eu) that supports the acquisition, management, processing andanalysis of both static (e.g. soil, geology) and dynamic data (e.g. environmental and daily climatic data), togetherwith data visualization and computer on-the-fly applications, in order to perform modelling, all of which ispotentially accessible via the Web. The S-DSS tool known as EcoSmarTour is demonstrated through a case study ofthe Campania region (South Italy) and, by connecting database and modelling, it aims to deliver a large amountof information that will improve knowledge of the territory, manage scenario analysis, produce maps andevaluate potential ecotourism footpaths or areas of interest, thus enabling the provision of better information onthe entire ecotourism sector. The tool will also be demonstrated through reference to a short selection ofadditional use cases from elsewhere in Europe. Most importantly, the approach adopted is highly transferablebecause it relies on very general algorithms that can be easily applied wherever the necessary data are available.