Geospatial investigation of site suitability for ecotourism development using AHP and GIS techniques in Uttara Kannada district, Karnataka state, India

The study aimed to spatially examine the viability and site suitability of ecotourism in the Uttara Kannada district, India. Karnataka is a fantastic destination for a variety of travel and has a lot of potentials to promote ecotourism, which has acquired popularity in recent years. Ecotourism is important to the conservation and safeguarding of biodiversity. Consequently, the current research aims to find potential ecotourism areas in the Uttara Kannada district, utilizing the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and Geographical Information System-Remote sensing (GIS-RS) methodologies. The study is based on the application of GIS-RS factors for landscape naturalness, climatic features, accessibility parameters, topographic attributes, protected and reserved regions, and natural attractiveness in the GIS platform via a weighted overlay method. To analyze and appraise the ecotourism potential in the study area, the research uses satellite and weighted overlays of auxiliary data from AHP. As an outcome, 53.54 % of the highly suitable land was found over the forest regions and finally, the Unsuitable regions were mainly indicated over the miscellaneous area (47.46 %). The majority of the most suitable ecotourism sites that fall under category S1 are located in the Taluks like Joida (27 %) and Karwar (15 %). The outcome of this paper as expected is that very high and moderately suitable regions were initiated in the forest region. The study's findings and methodology will be useful to decision-makers and planners.