Mongolia is listed country with rich natural attraction, variety of biodiversity, beauty of wild-nature, huge Gobi dessert, many of historical sites, and traditional nomadic population and its landscape culture that made enough potential for the establishment of the ecotourism industry development. Under the new tourism strategy planning in Mongolia was adopted in 2007 that emphasized the perspectives of ecotourism development in the rural areas, especially to expand destinations for attract more tourists, and to control and monitoring tourism management for conserving environment which can support the both decision making system, and local communities and tourists. However, current working systems are inadequate for the efficient ecotourism spatial planning and maintenance of tourism information system.
A key area for this study is the Biger city of Gobi-Altai province, in south western Mongolia. There, main attraction is natural sand sauna services, beauty of natural scenes, and cultural landscape of steppes, horses, Ger and Herders for visitors. In the recent years, with the increasing popularity and publicity of natural travel, the numbers of visitors have been rapidly increasing. However, the monetary benefits are insufficient due to the lack of visitor?s growth resulting in local economy and also it is leading cause of environmental and social problems around region. Under these circumstances, in order to balance the economic benefits and use of the resources, the local government has a plan to develop ecotourism industry based on natural and recreational resources of the region. However, the challenge of ecotourism industry lies in the complexity of the issue because of lack of unavailable tourist spatial and non-spatial database, the creation of ecotourism policy, limited protection for use of local resources, and no control system to minimize potential negative impacts of tourism.
In looking to develop tourism industry in a way that the geospatial planning approaches is more compatible with the rural context. To overcome these challenges in tourism data management and mapping tourist?s spots, the authors have designed a common spatial analysis system. First we have built a tourism spatial database. The second we were examined the potential natural and recreational resources. Finally, we mapped all potential spots spatially for ecotourism development at the Biger city of Gobi-Altai provinces in western Mongolia. Resource evaluation framework were used both qualitative and quantative geo-spatial techniques employing by the steps of resources investigation, classification, and evaluation analysis and mapping to assess ecotourism resources. The system database is organized into GIS database storage environment in ArcGIS9.3 software as part of building a tourism resources geo-database that including attraction distributions, accessibility network, infrastructure facilities and services, and environmental impacts associated with their attributes which collected by own elaborated field work using hand-held GPS and PDA, and high resolution satellite images and base maps. These comprehensive databases allowed to mapping tourism infrastructures such as spatial characteristics of attractions, supporting facilities, accessing networks and interesting destinations that can provide tourist information on maps for both tourists, and tourism development authorities.
In the structural and spatial distribution analysis, the tourism resources show the characteristic of ?Five villages? spatial relations that play fundamental roles for the ecotourism development in the Biger city. Assessment result were identified twenty seven potential resource sites which have high attraction diversity, poor accessibility, high activity of participation, low capacity of facilities and low level of environmental impact. The research findings also illustrate the types of assessment data yielded by several alternative methods and demonstrate their utility to local planning managers. The results will enable state and local tourism organizations to recognize areas with tourism potential and thus increase their competitiveness. Specifically, decision makers in the field may use this study as a base to allocate resources, and initiate new advertising plans.