Background

The exponential growth of tourism activities around the world is putting significant environmental pressure on popular destinations. However, this information is often not available due to the difficulties in assessing the impact of tourism activities on a broader scale, and not only limit the impact assessment on transportation.

As tourism represents 10% of the global GDP, the development of environmental indicators indexes related to tourism activities is of vital importance to support sustainable environmental and economic activities at global, regional and local scales.

Environmental Indicators

Murmuration service provides a way to measure and monitor environmental pressure caused by tourism activities and deliver it to all the stakeholders. Murmuration's indicators cover different themes: air and atmosphere, water, biodiversity and vegetation, soils and quantification of tourism activity.

Different structural indicators and trends are explored by examining, for example, changes in land cover (via the integration of the urbanization layer of the Copernicus Land service) and water stress (green water estimates based on soil moisture estimation algorithms), over long periods (more than a decade) and shorter time scales (recent years).

Developed to support decision-makers

The data collected are made available to stakeholders and decision-makers through interactive and visual dashboards and via different APIs such as OGC standardized protocols (WMS, WFS), deployed on WEkEO.

This information not only allows tourism actors to integrate ecological considerations into their decision-making, but also supports local authorities in better planning local infrastructure and activities and implementing protective measures to prevent environmental damage and degradation.