Abstract
Geodiversity is the natural diversity of features of geological structure, relief, and soil cover, including the relationships between these features, their properties, and their impact on other elements of the natural and cultural environment. It is described and analyzed using various types of quantitative, qualitative, or quantitative–qualitative methods. The concept of a geodiversity map presented in this article belongs to the third of these groups of methods. Despite the use of optimization methods in the form of a hexagon grid or the analytic hierarchy process calculator, it still remains partially subjective. The use of this method to calculate the geodiversity of an entire province (the Western Carpathians) gives a general view of the natural diversity of this area and allows regions to be selected for more detailed analyses or comparisons to be made between them. The geodiversity map is also a very good background on which to illustrate geotourist potential, which is expressed in terms of the number and distribution of geosites. However, in the case of the Western Carpathians, these two variables do not correlate with each other.
Highlights
The synthetic geodiversity map consists of four component maps, which will be analyzed below
- The geodiversity map presented in the article is another modification of the map algebra proposed by Zwoliński (2009)
- The geodiversity analysis for such a large area as the Western Carpathians is the first step in delineating areas requiring more detailed analysis of geotourist potential
Summary
The concept of geodiversity appeared in the literature in the 1990s and very quickly became popular among scientists around the world (e.g., Dixon, 1996; Kozłowski, 1997, 2004; Kostrzewski, 1998, 2011; Zwoliński, 2004; Gray, 2004, 2005, 2018a; Serrano and Ruiz-Flaño, 2007a; Gordon et al, 2012; Najwer and Zwoliński, 2014) It is defined in several contexts: geological, as the natural diversity of features of geological structure (rocks, minerals, and fossils), relief (forms and processes), and soil cover, including the relationships between these features, their properties, and their impact on other elements of the natural and cultural environment (Gray, 2004, 2013; Zwoliński, 2004); geological and anthropogenic, as the natural variation of the Earth’s surface, including geological and geomorphological forms which was formed by endo- and exogenous processes and human activity (Kozłowski et al, 2004a; 2004b); geographical, in which geodiversity is defined as the diversity of geocomplexes and geocomponents in a studied area, i.e., landscape diversity (Kostrzewski, 1998; Mizgajski, 2001); and anthropocentric, in which geodiversity is defined as the diversity of abiotic nature in terms of its ecological, economic, social, and esthetic significance to humans (Guthrie, 2005). The most complex definition and significance of geodiversity in geoconservation were created by Gray (2013)
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