Tourism Impact Assessment in Forested Land Using Geo Informatics

The environment is being increasingly recognized as a key factor in tourism. The main purpose of tourism activities is the deployment of recreational facilities in an area with tourism potential. Tourism in Athirappilly is the largest industry, that providing several benefits to government and rural peoples. Tourism emergence, which lead naturally or consciously to the degradation of tourist heritage are represented by the natural disturbance of the surface areas of tourist interest and forest cover. The study focused on the impacts of tourism on forest area in Athirappilly region by comparing Landsat images from 1985 and 2012.The work was mapping the affected areas of forest as a result of tourism introduction based on physical characteristics. These are landscape or naturalness (land use/cover), topography (slope, drainage) and settlement size. At First, a list of tourism related criteria were developed. In present study raster based weightage method was carried out for the preparation of tourism disturbance map. GIS based techniques were used to measure the ranking of different criteria according those with the best potential for the study data utilized include survey of India to geographic maps. Subsequently, the forest disturbance map was created based on the combination of criteria and factors with their respective weights. The disturbed area of forest was classified as very high, high, moderate and low. The methodology proposed was useful in identifying disturbed areas of forest by linking the criteria deemed. GIS can then subsequently evaluate dynamic patterns of land use cover as well as, providing a tool for ecotourism planning in Athirappilly areas. Likewise, this study can be used as a basis for identifying mitigation measures for more complex studies in future.