Increasing the sustainability of agro-tourism activities within the agroecology concept through GIS Technologies.

The sustainability of agro-tourism activities may strongly benefit from an analysis conducted within the Agroecology concept at landscape level. This approach could expand sustainable farming beyond individual fields, to entire ecosystems, optimizing biodiversity and ecological connectivity. Such an integrated analysis could be favourably performed through the implementation of GIS technologies, that would allow the view of the territory no longer as a simple static map, but as a dynamic ecosystem, where sustainable agricultural production and public recreation influence each other. Indeed, the use of GIS in this field would connect geospatial data (i.e.: slopes; land use; biodiversity; etc.) cross-referenced with socio-economic variables (e.g.: tourist flows; presence of agritourism facilities; etc.). This article presents the initial results obtained through the implementation of GIS tools, to perform a Land Suitability Analysis on a study area in Southern Italy (Basilicata Region), in which agroecology and tourism can suitably coexist. In this context, a mapping of ecosystem services was obtained, together with the planning of some excursion networks and “Food tours”. These results, enabled an analysis of landscape fragmentation, together with an assessment of climate change resilience, which ultimately led to the creation of tools useful to help operators into diversifying their tourism offer.