Geotourism is a useful way to educate societies in the field of geomorphology and related natural hazards. Geosites, including geomorphosites, represent the basis for the development of this type of tourism. This study describes 12 representative gully regions within nine European countries. The characteristics of 42 permanent gullies, gully systems, and badland landscapes are presented. Based on scientific values of the sites, educational lessons to be learned were identified that are mainly related to (i) gullies as a geological window, (ii) present-day geomorphological processes and (iii) stages of historical gully erosion reflecting past human-environment interactions. To evaluate possible education activities, a geotouristic assessment of the studied gullies and badlands was made, based on scientific, educational, functional and touristic indicators. This assessment demonstrates a large difference between the selected gully and badland sites, particularly with regard to functional and tourist values. The geotouristic potential of gullies (badlands) is the highest in Italy and Spain and the lowest in Romania and Latvia. In some countries, permanent gullies are not regarded as geotouristic attractions at all, while in others, they constitute a significant element of their tourism development strategy. In our opinion, all activities must be part of a broader strategy for the development of geotourism in gully and badland regions, for example, gullies may be included as geosites within existing or planned geoparks.
The environmental management and nature protection policy in Latvia is mainly focused on biodiversity and protected species, while a geodiversity is ‘forgotten side’ of nature conservation work. Such situation is associated with an absence of a unified methodology for assessment of geodiversity, which is a shortened version of the term ‘geological and geomorphological diversity’. The concept of geodiversity, as well the quantitative assessment of abiotic nature values is successfully used in the last decade. However, it has not yet been applied in Latvia for purposes of environmental management. Considering that the aim of this study was to apply the methodology described in the scientific literature for the assessment of geodiversity index in the GIS environment. The estimating of geodiversity was performed in two protected nature areas in south-eastern Latvia, i.e. nature reserve “Pilskalnes Siguldiņa” and geological nature monument “Adamovas krauja”. The calculations of geodiversity index were done based on the components as geological data, landform units, morphogenetic processes, hydrological features and terrain roughness. The input data were processed, and numerical methods that analyze spatial data in regular grid format were applied in ArcGIS. The output data on the spatial variability of geodiversity index were reclassified in three classes in order to identify areas with low, medium and high geodiversity respectively. The assessment of geodiversity by quantifying the spatial distribution of geodiversity index can be used as a tool for environmental management of protected nature areas and spatial planning, allowing to identify places with high potential value and to prevent their transformations.
The most common method to determine the presence of clay in lakebed is coring method. This method requires survey of the whole lake area using stratified sampling method which is time and physical labour consuming process. To lessen the amount of coring samples and narrow the area of clay survey thus making the whole process faster and more effective, research was made to determine the possibility to indentify clay and its sediments using georadar survey or ground penetrating radar (GPR) method. GPR data analysis and coring studies in lake Zeiļu were used to evaluate GPR as potential method in lake clay sediment research. GPR method was tested in summer and winter during ice-covered period.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.