Search Results (1,403)

Although recreational experience segmentation is widely used in coastal tourism research, existing motivational frameworks have been developed primarily in island and protected-area destinations, leaving urban, open-access, developing-country contexts theoretically underexplored. This study addresses that gap by identifying the dimensions of recreational experience and market segments for the city of Salinas, Ecuador—an accessible, family-oriented, urban coastal destination—to advance sustainable tourism management. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional design, data were collected through a structured questionnaire administered to 385 tourists; 374 cases with complete scale responses were retained for analysis. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) identified seven motivational dimensions: environment and sustainable recreational resources, learning and knowledge, affective well-being and creative harmony, interest and enjoyment in the experience, aquatic natural resources and wildlife, cognitive stimulation and emotional connection, and hedonic well-being. A K-means cluster analysis, validated through the elbow method (inflection at k = 3) and silhouette coefficient (0.25), revealed three distinct tourist segments: intensive recreational tourists (n = 183; 48.9%), moderate recreational tourists (n = 136; 36.4%), and passive recreational tourists (n = 55; 14.7%). Chi-square tests confirmed significant associations between clusters and sociodemographic variables including gender, marital status, and number of visits. This study offers four theoretical contributions: it reports a more detailed motivational factor structure than previously documented three- and four-factor models for coastal destinations; it proposes recreational amotivation—grounded in self-determination theory—as a candidate visitor profile that merits further theoretical and empirical validation; it advances a destination-type-sensitive motivational framework; and it provides boundary condition evidence clarifying the contextual scope of recreational experience theory. These findings offer actionable segmentation tools for destination managers seeking to differentiate and sustain coastal tourism markets. Full article

Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects are increasingly affecting Mediterranean coastal cities, where climate change, urbanization, and seasonal tourism intensify thermal stress and environmental vulnerability. In this context, climate-oriented planning and green infrastructure are recognized as key strategies for urban adaptation. This study investigates the spatiotemporal evolution of Land Surface Temperature (LST) and vegetation cover in the coastal municipality of Lignano Sabbiadoro (northeastern Italy) through the analysis of Landsat imagery acquired between 1984 and 2023. Summer LST and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) maps were derived from June–August observations and used to assess long-term thermal dynamics, vegetation patterns, and Urban Heat Island development. Meteorological data indicate a significant increase in mean annual air temperature, with a warming trend of approximately 0.57 °C per decade between 1984 and 2023. Correspondingly, Landsat-derived LST maps reveal a marked intensification of summer surface temperatures, with mean summer LST increasing from 32.16 °C in 1984–1993 to a peak of 35.91 °C in 2004–2013, followed by a slight decrease to 35.77 °C during 2014–2023. During the same period, the proportion of municipal surfaces characterized by temperatures above 35 °C increased from 10.7% to more than 60%, while cooler areas (<30 °C) declined from 17.7% to 2.3%. The comparison between LST and NDVI patterns revealed a persistent inverse relationship between vegetation cover and surface temperature, with coastal pinewoods, green spaces, and water bodies consistently exhibiting lower thermal values than densely urbanized sectors. A key methodological contribution of the study is the operational integration of satellite-derived thermal remote sensing into the Green Plan of Lignano Sabbiadoro. LST mapping was used to identify priority areas for climate adaptation measures, including ecological corridors, wooded landscape connections, urban green corridors, and depaving interventions. The results demonstrate how multi-temporal thermal analysis can support evidence-based planning by linking climate assessment with the spatial prioritization and design of green infrastructure strategies. The proposed workflow provides a transferable framework for integrating remote sensing into climate-informed planning processes in Mediterranean coastal cities and other urban contexts increasingly exposed to heat-related risks. Full article

With the continuous improvement of tourism infrastructure and the rapid development of digital platforms, tourism development is increasingly shaped by both traditional and digital factors. As one of China’s major urban agglomerations, the Urban Agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River provides an important case for examining regional tourism development in the digital era. This study investigates 31 prefecture-level cities and develops a comprehensive evaluation framework covering tourism development foundation, platform visibility, and tourism market performance. The entropy weight-TOPSIS method, coupling coordination model, GIS spatial analysis, and optimal-parameter geographical detectors are employed to examine spatial patterns and driving mechanisms. The results show that Wuhan, Changsha, and Nanchang constitute three major tourism growth poles. Tourism development foundation exhibits a clear core–periphery pattern, while the overall coupling coordination degree remains moderate to low, with some cities characterized by high coupling but low coordination. Platform visibility is identified as a key factor contributing to spatial disparities and demonstrates a significant nonlinear enhancement effect when interacting with transportation factors. These findings highlight the importance of digital platforms in regional tourism development and provide implications for promoting coordinated tourism development within urban agglomerations. Full article

Coastal marinas and high-traffic nearshore sites accumulate pollution from vessel movements, tourism, and shifting weather, yet routine monitoring rarely operates at the temporal resolution needed to catch emerging risks before they become acute. This study developed an AI-enabled decision support system and tested it across three European coastal sites over a 90-day window in summer 2025: an urban marina (Site A), a tourism marina (Site B), and a mixed-use port channel (Site C). A composite Water Quality Risk Index (WQRI), combining five normalised environmental and vessel-traffic stressor dimensions, fed a two-layer AI framework in which a gradient boosting model estimated short-term traffic-related stress and a random forest model classified next-day risk. Vessel traffic was heaviest at Site B, but water quality risk followed a different pattern: Site C returned the highest mean WQRI and logged the most hours under red alert despite intermediate traffic volumes, indicating that sustained moderate traffic mattered more than peak volume. Vessel intensity and WQRI were positively correlated at all three sites, most strongly at Site B, and the next-day random forest risk classifier, trained across all three sites, achieved strong discriminative performance (AUC 0.93). When the system indicated elevated risk, managers responded by deploying inspections, issuing traffic advisories and increasing monitoring activity. The pilot shows that connecting vessel tracking, environmental sensing, and ML-based classification into a single decision loop can move coastal pollution management from reactive to anticipatory. Full article

Vernacular settlements retain tangible fabric and intangible knowledge that can support climate-responsive conservation, adaptive reuse, and urban regeneration, yet these dimensions are often assessed separately. This study applies a values-based conservation framework to examine how heritage significance is expressed through settlement morphology, material systems, environmental performance, community knowledge, and continuing use in two historic settlements and one contemporary neighbourhood in Oman. Heritage significance is interpreted through six interconnected domains: historical-continuity, architectural-spatial, environmental, material-technical, social-cultural, and functional-economic value. A comparative mixed-method case-study design combined field observation, photographic documentation, urban and architectural morphological analysis, semi-structured interviews, and building-performance simulation. The findings show that the historic settlements achieved greater built intensity through attached buildings, shared walls, limited setbacks, shaded routes, mixed functions, and layered public–private organization. Interview evidence associated these characteristics with privacy, shared-resource management, traditional construction knowledge, social continuity, adaptive reuse, and continued occupation. Simulation results indicated substantially lower cooling-energy demand in the representative vernacular dwellings, whereas the contemporary villas achieved higher daylight levels and thermal conditions closer to neutrality under mechanical cooling. The study concludes that vernacular heritage should neither be conserved as static physical fabric nor reproduced literally. Interventions related to tourism, infrastructure, accessibility, privacy, commercial reuse, and residential continuity should be negotiated among stakeholders. Full article

Water is a valuable resource that needs to be managed carefully. Therefore, sustainable water consumption is a critical issue, mainly in urban areas, where tourism activities are of great importance. In mainland Portugal, this has become a crucial matter, particularly because of climate limitations and the recent growth of the tourism sector. To manage water resources effectively, we must analyze the primary factors driving consumption. Therefore, an econometric model to identify the main factors is a relevant tool for policy design. This paper tries to fill this gap. In the first stage, an ordinary least squares (OLS) model was implemented. In a second stage, the autocorrelation is evaluated, and a weighted geographical regression (GWR) model is used to improve the previous results. The models were implemented in the 278 municipalities of continental Portugal, considering the average situation of the last decade. The results were promising since the OLS model presented an R² of 0.42 identifying purchasing power, urban green spaces, tourism and education as the main explanatory factors for water consumption. The geographical weight regression presented an R² of 0.646 proving the importance of considering spatial context for the identification of these factors’ influence on water consumption. Full article

The tourism sector in the Sultanate of Oman is central to “Oman Vision 2040”, with a strategic focus of the government on its dynamic transformation. Coastal regions, vital to tourism, are affected by changes to the coastline due to flash floods, sea-water flooding, and erosion. Despite its implications for tourism and the economy, this topic remains relatively under-explored, especially as to use of Sentinel-1 satellite images. This study assesses water-level changes due to erosion in the urban coastal region of the Al-Batinah governorate via land cover classification. Using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification technique, the overall accuracy is found to be 97.7% and the Kappa coefficient value for the year 2018 is 1.0. Although, when using the Random Forest (RF) classification technique, the accuracy is nearly identical, there is varying precision for the water area. A critical observation is made, showing significant increase of the water area from 2.99% in the year 2017 to 12.36% in the year 2025, suggesting water encroachment. With fixed-effect and combined-effect size meta-analysis models, the confidence levels were identified as 95.0% and 0.37, respectively, indicating a consistent variation in water area that supports the outcomes of image classification. This study offers a valuable insight for policymakers as to managing coastal regions, along with providing assistance to vulnerable coastal communities. The study focuses on a particular governorate, given the satellite images, whereas a broader regional comparison would address the limitation of the generalizability of results. In the future, the research could integrate surveys from coastal communities and businesses for a comprehensive qualitative data perspective on the region’s tourism sector. Full article

Over the last two decades, touristification has become one of the most influential concepts for understanding the relationship between tourism and urban change. However, existing research remains strongly shaped by the experiences of large metropolitan areas and globally recognized tourist destinations, leaving intermediate urban contexts comparatively underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by examining the Atlantic Urban System of the north-western Iberian Peninsula as a framework for understanding touristification beyond dominant metropolitan paradigms. Drawing on debates on touristification, ordinary cities, intermediate urbanism, and regional development, the article argues that the polycentric structure, historical peripherality, and growing integration of this urban system create distinctive conditions shaping tourism-related urban change. Building on previous work on the Atlantic Urban Axis, the paper conceptualizes the Atlantic Urban System as a territorial configuration composed largely of interconnected intermediate cities and develops a framework for analysing touristification through five interrelated dimensions: territorial position, housing market structure, tourism development trajectories, urban governance, and urban form. Rather than proposing a new urban type, the article highlights the analytical value of examining tourism-related transformations within a specific territorial configuration and contributes to ongoing efforts to diversify the geographical foundations of urban theory. Full article

Mangrove forests provide essential ecosystem services but are increasingly threatened by anthropogenic pressures and climate-related disturbances. Effective and accessible tools for assessing mangrove ecosystem condition are therefore needed to soundly support their conservation and management. This study adapted the “Coastal Health” framework originally proposed for assessing coastal ecosystems health to evaluate the health status of mangrove forests along the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Using freely available high-resolution imagery from Google Earth Pro 7.3, complemented by field observations, technical reports, and unpublished literature, 56 mangrove sites distributed across eight coastal departments were assessed according to their ecological integrity, hydrological connectivity, sediment dynamics, freshwater and marine inputs, mangrove species condition, and their potential for landward and seaward migration. The results showed that 54% of the evaluated sites were classified as being in “Good Health”, while 2% were categorized as “Health Warning”, 3% as “Surface Wounds”, 14% as “Minor Injury”, 25% as “Major Injury”, and 2% as “Deceased”. Mangroves in good condition were generally associated with protected areas, river mouths, estuaries, and relatively isolated coastal systems, whereas degraded ecosystems were affected by urban expansion, tourism infrastructure, hydrological alterations, coastal engineering works, and reduced freshwater inputs. The proposed methodology proved to be a simple, low-cost, and easily replicable tool for large-scale mangrove health assessment. It provides valuable information for prioritizing conservation and restoration actions and can be adapted to support mangrove monitoring and ecosystem-based coastal management in other regions worldwide. Full article

An informed society can contribute to the conservation of nature. Environmental interpretation encompasses experiences and topics that involve direct interaction between visitors and nature, and such interaction promotes ecological awareness. Exhibits in public places constitute educational settings that complement traditional institutions, promoting learning that involves not only teachers and students but also society at large, including visitors and tourists. The city of Mazatlán, Sinaloa (Mexico), presents a landscape dominated by wetlands, which are a representative ecosystem of this city. However, their conservation requires the active participation of the population. Currently, Mazatlán has 501,441 inhabitants, who affect the wetlands. By 2030, it is expected to have around 756,823 inhabitants, and by 2050, 1,306,423. Additionally, Mazatlán receives 3,872,691 tourists per year. The objective was to evaluate the themes of environmental (interpretation) activities and determine their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. Three sites were analyzed to collect information on the topics and develop a correspondence matrix. The results showed that the information provided contributes to 13 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals: 1. End of poverty, 2. Hunger and food security, 3. Health, 4. Education, 6. Water and sanitation, 8. Economic growth, 9. Resilient infrastructures, 11. Cities and settlements, 12. Sustainable production and consumption, 13. Climate change, 14. Ocean Conservation, 15. Forests, desertification, and biodiversity, and 17. Partnerships. Full article

The paper analyzes the evolution and strategy development for sustainable community-based ecotourism (CBET) in the commune of Hoa Bac in Central Vietnam. It is based on a pilot project carried out from 2019 to 2025 within the scope of a larger research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of the research line ‘Sustainable Urban Regions’. As a key component of the overall research approach, the goal of this pilot project along the Cu De River valley in the vicinity of the city of Da Nang has been a culturally adapted and ecologically sensitive tourism model that leads to income and socio-economic improvement, environmental protection and a decentralized low-impact infrastructure. The results of six years of qualitative longitudinal participatory research based on community workshops, interviews and surveys, direct observations as well as participatory field activities show how transformations in natural, cultural, human, social, financial and built capitals have shaped the transition from resource-dependent livelihoods to a diversified ecotourism economy. By mobilizing and empowering the local community, partly belonging to the Co Tu ethnic minority, sustainable development emerged not from isolated interventions but from a structured process of interlinked development strategies including cultural revitalization, environmental preservation, locally adapted agroforestry, skills and capacity development, cooperative governance, decentralized infrastructure, and income diversification. The study demonstrates that stakeholder and community empowerment, appropriately designed governance models (in this case the establishment of a tourism cooperative), targeted capacity development and knowledge transfer can strengthen the resilience and long-term sustainability of ecologically sound and culturally adaptive community-based tourism initiatives. Overall, the lessons learned from the research in Hoa Bac contribute to designing and implementing a holistic approach to CBET in rural settings. Full article

Identifying the spatio-temporal evolutionary patterns and driving mechanisms of rural tourism network attention is essential for predicting the development trends of the rural tourism industry and delivering refined industrial governance. Taking 356 prefecture-level cities in China from 2015 to 2024 as basic research units, this paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation system for rural tourism network attention based on multi-source data. Furthermore, its spatio-temporal evolution characteristics and internal influencing factors are systematically investigated by means of spatial autocorrelation analysis and geographically weighted regression. The results indicate that the overall level of rural tourism network attention in China shows an obvious fluctuating growth trend, which can be divided into three successive stages, namely steady growth (from 0.8530 in 2015 to 1.2028 in 2019), explosive growth (from 1.9563 in 2020 to 3.7471 in 2021) and high-level fluctuation (maintained in the high range of 2.4–3.4). In addition, with the continuous iteration of internet communication media, the guiding influence of traditional search platforms has gradually weakened, while emerging social media and short-video platforms have become the core carriers of online tourism traffic. Correspondingly, media innovation persistently reshapes the spatial distribution pattern of rural tourism network attention. In terms of spatial characteristics, rural tourism network attention has undergone a significant transformation from geographical gradient polarization to overall regional equilibrium. Specifically, from 2015 to 2024, the overall Moran’s I index remained positive, with values ranging from 0.0116 to 0.1358, indicating an overall trend of gradual decline. High-attention areas are predominantly concentrated in economically developed urban agglomerations, whereas remote and economically underdeveloped regions exhibit contiguous low-value aggregation characteristics, which reveals a remarkable trend of balanced development nationwide. In view of driving mechanisms, highway network density, tourism income, rural tourism resource and enrollment of university students are identified as the core driving factors dominating the spatio-temporal evolution of rural tourism network attention. Moreover, the intensity of the influence of each factor presents distinct spatial heterogeneity. This study further reveals that the spatial heterogeneity of rural tourism network attention calculated using multi-source fused data shows a remarkable convergent characteristic, which can reflect the actual distribution of the rural tourism market more objectively and accurately. Meanwhile, rural tourism network attention is typically characterized by scale-dependent with the spatial distribution at the macro-scale being more balanced than that at the meso- and micro-scales. Full article

User-generated content (UGC) offers large-scale, naturalistic data for examining tourism destination image. Focusing on the Historic Centre of Macao (HCM), a World Cultural Heritage site, this study collected 3781 tourist reviews from Rednote, Ctrip, Dianping, and TripAdvisor and developed a multi-model text-mining framework integrating TF-IDF, BERTopic, and RoBERTa. The results show that HCM’s online tourism image comprises four dimensions: perceptions of history, culture, and heritage value; perceptions of spatial landmarks and urban landscapes; modes of travel behavior and embodied experience; and emotional evaluation and tourism experience quality. The TF-IDF results indicate that terms such as architecture, history, Portuguese, church, Ruins of St. Paul’s, and Senado Square constitute the core elements of tourists’ cognitive image. BERTopic further identified 18 valid topics and revealed three interrelated semantic clusters: heritage-space cognition, landmark and district experiences, and integrated tourism experiences. The RoBERTa-based sentiment analysis shows that tourists’ overall evaluations are dominated by positive emotions, while crowding, high visitor density, and gaps between expectations and actual experiences remain important sources of negative evaluations. This study demonstrates the applicability of the proposed framework in the Historic Centre of Macao and provides a methodological reference for tourism image research in other cultural heritage destinations. Full article

Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 11 requires active engagement of local communities in environmental protection and sustainable urban development. Although residents play a critical role in supporting sustainability initiatives, limited research has examined how community-related factors shape environmental attitudes, environmental engagement, and support for sustainable behaviour in urban tourism destinations. This study investigates the relationships among destination social responsibility, community attachment, community involvement, environmental attitudes, community environmental participation, environmental advocacy and action, perceived environmental benefits, and support for sustainable behaviour among residents of Novi Sad, Serbia. Data were collected from 1038 residents and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results show that community attachment positively influences environmental attitudes and support for sustainable behaviour, while community involvement enhances community environmental participation and environmental advocacy and action. Environmental attitudes positively affect community environmental participation, environmental advocacy and action, and perceived environmental benefits. Perceived environmental benefits, in turn, strengthen support for sustainable behaviour. Conversely, destination social responsibility does not significantly influence community attachment or community involvement. The findings highlight the importance of strengthening residents’ attachment to their community, encouraging participation in local affairs, and fostering positive environmental attitudes to promote sustainable urban development. The study contributes to sustainable urban tourism research by identifying key social and psychological mechanisms that encourage environmental engagement and support for sustainability-oriented behaviour. Full article

Urban marketplaces are increasingly recognised in European policy debates as multifunctional public spaces that extend beyond their traditional economic role. Across the European Union, emerging trends point to a shift towards market models that integrate social interaction, cultural activities, tourism, sustainable food production and place-based urban development, thereby contributing to more inclusive and liveable cities. However, the extent to which such transformations align with local actors’ perspectives and existing governance arrangements remains underexplored, particularly in Central European contexts. This paper evaluates the transformative potential of urban marketplaces as multifunctional public spaces from the perspective of key stakeholders in the City of Zagreb. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining a desk analysis of European policy and practice trends with empirical research conducted at the local level. Data were collected through surveys of marketplace users (citizens) and vendors (tenants), complemented by focus groups with other relevant local actors. This approach provides insights into everyday practices, perceived barriers, governance challenges, and future expectations related to marketplace development. The findings reveal a strong alignment between stakeholder perspectives and European policy trends promoting people-centred and multifunctional marketplaces, while also identifying tensions with existing management and governance frameworks. Citizens emphasise the cultural, social, and tourism value of marketplace interactions, whereas vendors and governance actors highlight infrastructure needs and the importance of more participatory governance arrangements. The paper argues that stakeholder-based evaluation of transformative potential is essential for advancing inclusive, resilient, and sustainable urban regeneration through urban marketplaces. Full article