Land use/cover disturbance due to tourism in JesenÃky Mountain, Czech Republic: A remote sensing and GIS based approach

Remote sensing; GIS; Tourism; Land cover classification Abstract The Jesenı́ky Mountains tourism in Czech Republic is unique for its floristic richness. This is caused mainly by the altitude division and polymorphism of the landscape, climate and soil structure. This study assesses the impacts of tourism on the land cover in the Jesenı́ky Mountain region by comparing multi-temporal Landsat imageries (1991, 2001 and 2013) to describe the rate and extent of land-cover changes. This was achieved through spectral classification of different land cover classes and by assessing the change in forest; settlements; pasture and agriculture in relation to increasing distances (5, 10 and 15 km) from three tourism sites with the help of ArcGIS software. The results indicate that the area was deforested (11.13%) from 1991 to 2001 than experienced forest regrowth (6.71%) from 2001 to 2013. In the first decade pasture and agriculture areas increased and then in next decade decreased. The influence of tourism facilities on land cover is also variable. Around each of the tourism site sampled, there was a general trend of forest removal decreasing as the distance from each village increased, which indicates tourism does have a negative impact on forests. However there was an opposite trend from 2001 to 2013 that indicates conservation area. The interplay among global (tourism, climate), regional (national policies, large-river management) and local (construction and agriculture, energy and water sources to support the tourism industry) factors drives a distinctive but complex pattern of land-use and land-cover disturbance. 2014 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences. This is an open access article under theCCBY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).