Grasslands Development for Ecotourism: Aesthetic Perspectives

Grasslands (also known as savanna, prairie, steppe, and pampas) are natural or seminatural areas encompassing vegetation belonging to the family Poaceae as the most dominant vegetation, while, sedges and rushes may also constitute a minor proportion. These provide numerous natural products such as food feed medicinal raw material, and honey along with nonproduct-based ecosystem services. Grasslands in lowlands and mountains either in natural form or developed landscape can provide an added value in terms of ecotourism opportunities owing to having huge esthetic and recreational potential compared to uniform agricultural areas. Grasslands characterized by high species and habitat diversity-based ecotourism are nature-based tourism whereby people visit natural or developed areas for recreation, sight-seeing, permitted and controlled hunting, on-site purchase of organic products, etc., and are usually managed by adopting sustainable practices. Ecotourism generates multifaceted economic advantages for local communities such as direct sale of products to tourists. However, ecotourism may also have a variety of negative impacts when the tourists’ number multiplies which leads to overuse of resources. The most pronounced challenges confronted to the development of grasslands for ecotourism include lack of community cooperation, careless herders, need of hefty investment, and absence of trained human capital along with climate change and loss of biodiversity.