Mapping Flooded Paddy-Rice Fields in the Landscape between Turin and Milan: A GIS-Based Method for Detecting Scenic Routes for Experiential Tourism

The current research aims to explore the potential of ESA Sentinel-2 time-series satellite imagery, for detecting the seasonal landscape changes of paddy-rice fields, in the north-west of Italy, by using GIS mapping tools. On a regional scale context, paddy-rice mapping has several implications for agricultural monitoring, precision farming, food production, water management and climate change. However, it also concerns theirs high scenic value in the landscape perception, which can be a great resource for sustainable tourism. The defining characteristic of paddy-rice is that rice plants grow on flooded soils. In the field of slow tourism, such a temporary site-specific condition of the landscape can become an unconventional tourist destination. The research has been applied to territories in between cities: Turin and Milan, where the phenomenon of paddy-rice flooding, in the spring season, generates an outstanding scenic perception of the rural landscape. The research shows the effectiveness of the GIS workflow to compute the vegetation indices, which are sensitive for mapping flooded paddy-rice fields. The final outcome is a thematic map highlighting the scenic routes in the existing road network that allows experiencing such seasonal landscape conditions.