Planning low-impact tourist paths within a Site of COmmunity Importance through the optimisation of biological and logistic criteria

A leading goal in the management of protected areas is to promote a balanced coexistence between wildlife and people. Although this target may be achieved by limiting human activities through buffer zones and restricted areas, a more rigorous approach can be based on optimisation models founded on quantitative and transparent scientific methodologies. In this paper, a decision model is proposed, for the first time, for planning low-impact tourist paths within a European Union Site of Community Importance. The proposed methodology seeks to plan optimised paths based on a virtual landscape built on both biological and logistic criteria. Our model consists of four steps: (1) choice of biological and logistic constraints; (2) selection of biological and logistic factors; (3) use of fuzzy scoring to standardize and weight criteria and (4) application of least-cost modelling to the virtual landscape resulting from previous steps. We identified three optimised routes for new tourist paths which have the least possible impact on existing biodiversity (habitats, plant and animal species), meeting logistic criteria as well. The proposed approach also allows the impacts of suggested paths to be estimated quantitatively thereby allowing comparison with existent paths. Proposed paths, based on optimisation, perform considerably well; furthermore, we were able to propose the decommissioning of eight existing paths that have high impacts on biodiversity. This work not only proposes a framework for planning low-impact tourist paths within protected areas, but also purports the idea that, through the use of proper optimisation models, a satisfactory balance between nature and human activities is achievable.