Abstract
Nature-based tourism has potential to sustain biodiversity and economic development, yet the degree to which biodiversity drives tourism patterns, especially relative to infrastructure, is poorly understood. Here, we examine relationships between different types of biodiversity and different types of tourism in Costa Rica to address three questions. First, what is the contribution of species richness in explaining patterns of tourism in protected areas and country-wide in Costa Rica? Second, how similar are the patterns for birdwatching tourism compared to those of overall tourism? Third, where in the country is biodiversity contributing more than other factors to birdwatching tourism and to overall tourism? We integrated environmental data and species occurrence records to build species distribution models for 66 species of amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, and for 699 bird species. We used built infrastructure variables (hotel density and distance to roads), protected area size, distance to protected areas, and distance to water as covariates to evaluate the relative importance of biodiversity in predicting birdwatching tourism (via eBird checklists) and overall tourism (via Flickr photographs) within Costa Rica. We found that while the role of infrastructure is larger than any other variable, it alone is not sufficient to explain birdwatching and tourism patterns. Including biodiversity adds predictive power and alters spatial patterns of predicted tourism. Our results suggest that investments in infrastructure must be paired with successful biodiversity conservation for tourism to generate the economic revenue that countries like Costa Rica derive from it, now and into the future.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | e2107662119 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| Volume | 119 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 15 2022 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are thankful to colleagues at the Natural Capital Project and at the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University for invaluable comments. Particularly, we thank Drs. Morgan Kain, Lisa Mandle, Adrian Vogl, and Mary Ruckelshaus for their feedback. We also thank the Costa Rican Tourism Institute and the Central Bank of Costa Rica for providing reports and perspectives on the tourism sector in the country. In particular, we thank Johnny Villareal, Roxana Arguedas, and Rodolfo Lizano. We thank our reviewers Drs. Natalia Ocampo Peñuela and Monica Turner for their thorough reviews and for helping us improve this manuscript. Lastly, we thank Jim Zook for helping us identify the endemic and threatened birds of Costa Rica, and Dr. Daniel S. Karp for support throughout this project. We acknowledge funding from NASA (80NSSC18K0434) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Funding Information:
improve this manuscript. Lastly, we thank Jim Zook for helping us identify the endemic and threatened birds of Costa Rica, and Dr. Daniel S. Karp for support throughout this project. We acknowledge funding from NASA (80NSSC18K0434) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- conservation
- earth observations
- recreation
- rural livelihoods
- species distribution models
- Tourism
- Recreation
- Humans
- Economic Development
- Conservation of Natural Resources
- Biodiversity
- Costa Rica
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article
