Cerrado biome: Social-environmental weaknesses and potentialities of a trail project in the serra da canastra national park

Abstract

Ecotourism is one of the most developed activities in National Parks. The implementation of eco-tourism trails can act as tourist attraction and favor local enterprises, however, they can cause direct negative impacts on the environment. These impacts can be minimized through previous studies to verify the feasibility of implementing the trails. Therefore, the objective of this work was to point out socio-environmental weaknesses and potentialities of a trail project for tourist use in the Serra da Canastra National Park (PNSC), located in the southwest of Minas Gerais, in the Cerrado biome. For that, using multicriteria analysis in the ArcGIS software, maps of susceptibility to erosion and aptitude for tourism use around the trail were elaborated. The final analysis was carried out using the SWOT Analysis, which made it possible to summarize the socio-environmental weaknesses and potentialities, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses (present situation) and opportunities and threats (future situation, if the proposed trail is implemented). The results show that more than 80% of the studied area has high and very high aptitude for ecotourism, its main potential being the proximity to water resources and access roads, the predominance of moderate declivity (3-8%) and the possibility of development of local tourism and environmental awareness activities. On the other hand, the main weaknesses pointed to the threat of soil compaction, the evasion of endemic species and the rugged relief found in a stretch of the trail, showing that small changes in the path make the implementation of the proposed trail viable.