A process for community-scale tourism development modeling

Hit hard by cyclical market downturns and systemic restructuring in forestry and fishing, resource-dependent communities in the province of British Columbia, Canada, are seeking to diversify their economic bases through tourism. Visitors and host communities both are increasingly demanding that new tourism development not disrupt existing environmental, community and economic values. A recent project in Nootka Sound explored a planning process and technical methods to identify opportunities for new tourism business while seeking to address many of these concerns. This paper describes a development planning process which took steps toward empowering the local community to direct its own development future, while supplying meaningful input to officials charged with on-going operational management of the Sound's resources. It reports how the project applied GIS-based digital modeling techniques to identify and map areas of high biophysical resource capability for specified tourism products. These methods may hold useful lessons for communities seeking to identify their own tourism development potential.