Optimal Trail Routing for Recreational Management Through Visual Quality Values

Abstract

Tourism in forested landscape is one of the cultural ecosystem services with a continuous increase in demand by the public. Its importance has been recognized through recreational activities in forested landscapes closer to large urban centers with high population density. In this paper, we focus on visual quality values of forest sites as one of the ecosystem benefits in a forested landscape, and seek an optimal trail routing for recreational management based on visual quality values. We assume that tourists will visit sites in order to maximize the sum of visual quality values of the sites on their routing. We formulate the problem within the framework of the travel salesman problem (TSP), using an agroforestry site in Southern Portugal. Our computational experiments showed that TSP can be applied to search for optimal recreational route in a forested landscape with forest stands showing diverse visual quality levels.