Tourism Effect on the Spatiotemporal Pattern of Land Surface Temperature (LST): Babolsar and Fereydonkenar Cities (Cases Study in Iran)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of tourism on Land Surface Temperature (LST), an issue which has rarely been considered in the tourism development literature. In this research, remote sensing techniques have been used to analyze the changes in the LST and spectral indices including the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI) and Enhanced Built-Up and Bareness Index (EBBI). The data used were based on Landsat Collection 1 Surface Reflectance (SR) images taken in June and August. They were analyzed over 32 years in the years 1987, 1993, 1999, 2009, 2014 and 2019. The study area included the cities of Babolsar and Fereydonkenar and their suburbs in Mazandaran Province in the north of Iran and south of the Caspian Sea. First the tourism zones were separated from other land use zones and then the changes in land use and LST in each of the zones were studied for each year based on the trend of 32-year change. The results of Pearson correlation in the whole area for each main land use zone showed that there was a significant inverse relationship between the LST and the NDVI and MNDWI indices. This relationship was direct and significant for the EBBI index. Moreover, the results of one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey test showed that the LST changes in the tourism zones during the study period were significantly different from the other zones, so that the tourism zones always experienced lower LST. The findings also showed that, in the tourism zones, the values of the NDVI and MNDWI indices showed an increasing trend compared to the urban zone. Therefore, increasing the values of these indices due to the development of green space and its regular irrigation in tourism zones has led to a significant decrease in the LST. The applied results of this research in the urban planning and tourism literature indicate that any model of physical development such as urban development does not necessarily lead to an increase in the LST, and .