The STESY (Specialized Tourism Eco-Systems) Framework: A Data-Driven Taxonomy and Advanced Spatial Analytics for Managing Territorial Complexity and Sustainable Tourism Planning

Tourism is increasingly recognised as a spatially embedded phenomenon whose development reshapes land use, infrastructure systems, local economies, environmental resources, and social relations. However, tourism planning still frequently relies on fragmented conceptual classifications, aggregated administrative data, and sectoral strategies that do not adequately represent the functional geographies, internal heterogeneity, and cumulative impacts of tourism systems. This thesis addresses these limitations by developing the STESY framework—Specialised Tourism Eco-Systems—an integrated methodological architecture for the identification, modelling, assessment, and strategic governance of tourism ecosystems. The research combines four interconnected components: a spatially oriented ontology of tourism typologies; a spatially explicit model of tourism systems; composite indicators for evaluating infrastructural balance and territorial robustness; and GeoDesign processes for participatory scenario building and policy co-design. These components are organised into three research pillars: conceptual classification, spatial modelling and assessment, and collaborative governance. The methodological approach integrates a structured review of forty-one scientific contributions, a controlled Large Language Model workflow for the extraction and classification of explicitly defined tourism typologies, geospatial modelling of supply-side components, composite indicator construction, and participatory planning experimentation. The STESY model subsequently delineates functional Destination Areas through georeferenced tourism supply components and evaluates their structural balance, robustness, concentration patterns, and spatial mismatches. The framework is tested across diverse territorial contexts, including protected and inland areas in Basilicata, the nightlife tourism ecosystem of Berlin, and a participatory GeoDesign process in the Pollino National Park. The applications demonstrate the capacity of the approach to identify functional tourism geographies beyond administrative boundaries, reveal infrastructural imbalances and threshold conditions, and support the assessment of trade-offs between conservation, accessibility, tourism intensity, and economic development. The GeoDesign application further shows how spatial evidence can be integrated into collaborative decision-making, enabling stakeholders to co-produce geographically explicit and financially coherent development scenarios. The original contribution of the thesis lies in connecting ontological formalisation, spatial analytics, indicator-based assessment, and participatory governance within a unified and transferable planning-support framework. STESY is therefore conceived not only as an analytical model, but also as an operational platform capable of translating heterogeneous territorial data into policy-relevant knowledge, reproducible procedures, and decision-support tools for public administrations, protected areas, and local development agencies.