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The so-called Smart Cities have been playing an important role in the academic literatureas well as in the agenda of public policies. With the forward thinking of “creating” newurban development models, the cities intend to strategically positioning themselves and atthe same time develop cooperation networks. Frequently using the Information andCommunication Technologies (while as a means to an end and not as an end itself), thecities try to assure a greater economic competitiveness, the environmental sustainabilityand the reinforcement of citizenship (calling out to people to participate, in the scope of aninclusive logic and in an appeal to creativity and social responsibility).Even the 2020European strategy promotes this development.The geographic scope of the study islimited to the city of Porto. This is justified by the fact that, in 2015, Porto was one the fiveEuropean cities selected to participate in the GrowSmarter (model of organization of citiesof the future), an ambitious project with the objective of making Europe more sustainableand environmentally intelligent.Besides that, the Portuguese Smart Cities Index, 2016, points out the city of Oporto as thePortuguese city with better results in what concerns the main vectors of intelligence(policy, strategies and projects implemented, edification, mobility, energy and smartservices).At the same time, in the international press, the city of Porto appears as areference for its architectural wealth and as one of the more indicated Europeandestinations for one who would like to enjoy quality holidays at a reasonable price.That isperhaps why Shermans Travel presents Porto as one of the top 10 destinations forintelligent tourists. The purpose of the present study is to understand if the emergence ofsmart cities can be in some way connected to the appearance of smart tourism. For such apurpose, we will study the city of Porto and a survey will be conducted among the touristsof the city.This article compiles some of the first results of the study, referring to the datacollected during the months of August and September of 2017, and intends mainly to setout some hypotheses about the motivation for the choice of a tourist destination, that willbe developed in future works.

Many of the processes behind the decline of farmland birds can be related to modifications in landscape structure (composition and configuration), which can partly be expressed quantitatively with measurable or computable indices, i.e. landscape metrics. This paper aims to identify statistical relationships between the occurrence of birds and the landscape structure. We present a method that combines two comprehensive procedures: the “landscape-centred approach” and “guild classification”. Our study is based on more than 20,000 individual bird observations based on a 4-year bird monitoring approach in a typical agricultural area in the north-eastern German lowlands. Five characteristic bird guilds, each with three characteristic species, are defined for the typical habitat types of that area: farmland, grassland, hedgerow, forest and settlement. The suitability of each sample plot for each guild is indicated by the level of persistence (LOP) of occurrence of three respective species. Thus, the sample plots can be classified as “preferred” or “less preferred” depending on the lower and upper quartiles of the LOP values. The landscape structure is characterized by 16 different landscape metrics expressing various aspects of landscape composition and configuration. For each guild, the three landscape metrics with the strongest rank correlation with the LOP values and that are not mutually dependent were identified. For four of the bird guilds, the classification success was better than 80%, compared with only 66% for the grassland bird guild. A subset of six landscape metrics proved to be the most meaningful and sufficiently classified the sample areas with respect to bird guild suitability. In addition, derived logistic functions allowed the production of guild-specific habitat suitability maps for the whole landscape. The analytical results show that the proposed approach is appropriate to assess the habitat suitability of agricultural landscapes for characteristic bird guilds.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10661-017-5837-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.