Assessment of Selected Cultural Ecosystem Services: Benefits of Land Cover Ecosystems for Ecological Models of Tourism Development (Case Study of Devín, the District of Bratislava IV)

Cultural ecosystem services in particular represent immaterial benefits derived from aesthetic and other experiences, recreation, cognition and spiritual enrichment, as the ability to distinguish values. The character of tourism and landscape interactions could be solved through the development and the application of new quantification methods for natural and cultural--historical benefits of ecosystems, which is the aim of our study, using Bratislava IV as a case study. In our approach, landscape-ecological evaluation of landscape structure and appropriate tourism forms and activities taking into account the landscape diversity, genofond significance, generic rarity and biotope vulnerability is considered as the essence of tourism ecological model creation. The basis for spatial representation of ecosystems was the processing of secondary landscape structure map based on landscape cover classes. As the attractive and important landscape segments were identified elements representing the first (e.g., alluvial forests, oak-hombean forests, wetlands), second (e.g., bank growth) and third (e.g., vineyards, recreational areas) category of landscape-ecological significance. We have created an algorithm that takes into account the significance of the nature of the natural and cultural-historical sites in the landscape and showing and presenting 14 categories of ecological forms of tourism.