Coastal tourism planning using GIS-based system: the case of Shirud coast, Caspian Sea, Mazandaran, Iran

Coastal areas of rivers and seas are valuable and vital environmental resources, providing distinctive landscape characters of the urban/rural environment and focal zones for people’s most activities especially recreational. Since human interference often lead to changes in the natural environment, lack of comprehensive integrated planning for coastal areas, especially in estuaries where landscape characters of river and sea act integrated, would lead to degradation of coastal areas. In this research, decision-making for tourism activities allocation, which plays an important role in natural characters conservation especially in coastal sensitive areas, is done with a map-overlay method using Arc-GIS. The research tries to provide a method to reduce landscape alternations due to coastal tourism activities, suitable in both small and large scale areas. Categorizing the coastal landscape characters in two main categories including the basics of natural life of coasts and the basics of socio-cultural life of coasts and the common recreational coastal activities in two categories of nature based and utility based, the analysis is done for morphological-topographical and ecological characters in two scales. First, in the study area the “Shirud coast”, the characters were analyzed on a regional large scale, which resulted in zoning the area into nine zones. Secondly, on a smaller scale, dividing each zone into smaller grids, the sensitivity is again evaluated to increase the accuracy of results and finally, the suitable allocation of tourism activities is suggested. This research is done according to descriptive methods including desk-based studies and field surveys observation and the analyses are implemented with Arc GIS software. The results demonstrate that the areas subjected to erosion and sedimentation, the integrated transitional zones of sandy beach, estuary and the riparian buffer require the most conservation. While the estuary is labeled as the “no activity” zone, distancing from the shoreline to the backshore, the level of sensitivity is reduced where nature-based and utility-based activities are allowed.