Tourism landscape footprint in the archaeological landscape

Abstract

Tourism has an increasing influence on the environment, including a significant impact on the landscape. This article presents a method of assessing the Tourism Landscape Footprint in selected archaeological sites (in Poland), understood as a degree of the influence of tourist facilities on the landscape physiognomy. The more numerous the facilities, the more visible they are in the landscape, and the closer to the archaeological forms they are located, the greater is their visual impact. An index of the Tourism Landscape Footprint was proposed based on the assumption, that the impact of tourism facilities on the landscape depends on the number of the facilities, their type (a coefficient indicating the scale of the impact of the facilities on the landscape), and their location (distance to the archaeological forms). The results show that the landscape of the sites under consideration has not been strongly transformed, however, the obtained Tourism Landscape Footprint index is diversified. The differentiation of the index, of the archaeological forms (their number and area) and the tourism infrastructure, allowed us to group the sites (using the cluster analysis), in terms of the character of the landscape and the influence of the tourist development. Presented method provides a tool for comparing and diagnosing changes induced by tourism development in the historical landscape.