Abstract
Ecotourism is one of the fastest growing sectors in the tourism industry at present. Ecotourism has attracted increasing attention in recent years, not only as an alternative to mass tourism, means of economic development and environmental conservation. The present study is identifying the potential ecotourism sites in Dinsho district of Bale Zone, Southeastern Ethiopia using Geographic information system (GIS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This study was assessed the potential suitable areas for ecotourism based on Landscape (land use land cover), Topography (elevation, slope, aspect) and Climate Characteristics (rainfall). These factors were selected based to the literature reviews and the data availability. First, a resource inventory and a list of ecotourism criteria and factors were developed using the AHP method on ArcGIS 10.5. At the next stage GIS techniques were used to measure the ranking of different sites according to the set factors and identify those with the high, moderate, less and not suitable. Later, the ecotourism potential suitability map for ecotourism was created, based on the linear combination of the criteria and factors with their respective weights. The degree of suitability of each factor was classified as highly suitable, moderately suitable, less suitable and not suitable for ecotourism. The result of the study revealed that highly suitable for ecotourism potential area accounts for 24.43% (15873.6 ha), moderately suitable accounts 15.48% (10062.7ha), less potential areas 52.79% (34298.4 ha) and 7.30% (4739.7ha) not suitable in the study area. Therefore, this study shows that the district has high potential of ecotourism which can contribute to the livelihood of the community through sustainable natural resource management. GIS and AHP are essential and effective for ecotourism site suitability selection. Keywords: Ecotourism, Suitability, Analytic Hierarchy Process, GIS, Factors DOI: 10.7176/JTHS/52-02 Publication date: December 31 st 2020
Highlights
Tourism is one of the leading and the fastest growing industries in the world [1]
Potential Ecotourism Site Suitability The major result of this study is suitable areas map for ecotourism (Fig.7) that classified in four categories
The results showed that 15873.6 ha of study area (24.43%) was high suitable for ecotourism potential developments, 10062.7 ha (15.48%) was moderate suitable, 34298.4 ha (52.79%) was less suitable and 4739.7 ha (7.30%) was not suitable for ecotourism potential development (Table 4)
Summary
Tourism is one of the leading and the fastest growing industries in the world [1]. It is among the main economic sectors in promoting communities development through income generation and employment opportunities. Tourism plays a significant role to the economic development of many developing countries [2]. Ecotourism has a significant role to address conservation problems and generate alternative income sources for local communities [5]. It can contribute for socio-cultural development and sustainable use of the environmental sources [6]. Absence of adequate study on ecotourism potentials and the less dissemination in the ecotourism notion and approaches hinder the effective and sustainable development of the ecotourism in Ethiopia [9,10]
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