Utilizing the Geological Diversity for Sustainable Regional Development, a Case Study-Zonguldak (NW Turkey)

Evaluation of the Visitor Understanding of Coastal Geotourism and Geoheritage Potential Based on Sustainable Regional Development in Western Black Sea Region, Turkey

“…Scientific studies within the scope of geological heritage and geoconservation in Turkey: Yeşil [30] explained the alternative tourism phenomenon within the scope of geological heritage sites in the case of the Ballıca Cave; Keskin Citiroglu [23]-the subject of benefiting from geological diversity for sustainable regional development in Zonguldak; Çelik Ateş and Ateş [31]-the synergy of geotourism and rural tourism for sustainable development in Maçka Valley Tunceli; Demir and Aytaç [32]-Turkey's first and only UNESCO-registered global geopark Kula UNESCO Global Geopark; Köro glu and Kandemir [27]-sensitive geosites for Çal Camili Natural Park (Düzköy-Trabzon) region; Özgeriş and Karahan [33] evaluated the evaluation of geopark resource values for sustainable tourism in the case of Cittaslow city Uzundere. Ertekin [34] attempts to assess the geosites of the Nemrut volcano (Bitlis) and proposes using these areas as a geopark and geoheritage site.…”

“…There has been an increasing focus on geotourism as a means of realizing sustainable development through enhancing financial power [2,18], on the one hand, and environment conservation, on the other [21,22]. For a sustainable regional development and geotourism, the detection, the utilization and protection of geological heritage areas is of great significance [23]. Geotourism is becoming an important source of income in many rural areas [8,24,25].…”

Geotourism: definition, characteristics and international perspectives

“…This is illustrated in the many chapters of this book. Specific regions and/or countries where geotourism has been proposed include the Almeria Province, southeast Spain (Hose, 2007); Hawaii, USA (King, 2010); The Sultanate of Oman (Lawrence, 2010); Mt Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia (Tongkul, 2010); Mauritius (Johnson et al, 2010); the Kutch region, Gujarat, India (Swarna et al, 2013); the Lubelskie Province, southeastern Poland (Zgłobicki and Baran-Zgłobicka, 2013); China (Zhang et al, 2013); Malaysia (Ghani et al, 2013); Iceland (Ólafsdóttir and Dowling, 2014); the Idanre Hills, Nigeria (Anifowose and Kolawole, 2014); Western Australia (Pforr and Dowling, 2008;Pforr et al, 2014); in eight Chinese geoparks (Ng, 2015); Philippines (Aquino et al, 2017); Zonguldak, Turkey (Citiroglu et al, 2017); Waldviertel, Austria (Migoń, Różycka and Michniewicz, 2017); Serbia (Began et al, 2017), Australia and New Zealand (Dowling and Pforr, 2017) and in southern Egypt (Sallam et al, 2018). Community attitudes to geotourism development have been examined in Iran (Shahhoseini et al, 2017) and Poland (Różycka and Migoń, 2018).…”

Geotourism Destinations – Visitor Impacts and Site Management Considerations

“…Geotourism is now being used as a vehicle to foster sustainable tourism development in a number of regions around the world, for example, in China (Zhang et al, 2013), Malaysia (Ghani, Leman, & Komoo, 2013), Philippines (Aquino, Schänzel, & Hyde, 2017), Turkey (Citiroglu, Isik, & Pulat, 2017), and Serbia (Began et al, 2017).…”