InDEO Ecotourism ©
The tourism sector has seen significant COVID-19 disruptions resulting in many tourism providers and tourist locations and resorts facing financial problems. This is particularly so with remote tourism activity which relied on international travel. This is a serious state limiting the ability of remote regions to develop and maintain the natural environments.
This project aims to develop solutions that blend Drone and Earth Observation (EO) data to develop an eco friendly and rapidly scalable solution to stimulate the tourism sector. The solution InDEO Ecotourism brings in innovation in applying EO data in a novel way, using ‘windowing’ to allow operation on limited technology and limited bandwidth. It has innovation in blending Drone and EO data, overlaying around a focus. It further has innovation in enabling remote eco-tourists to direct or influence the Drone recording focus to enable a more immersive eco-tourism experience. The scalable solution model provides a set of engaging remote tourism experiences, either stand alone packages or complement traditional travel tourism that can be the base for sustainable business models and so provide resilience again sustained travel disruptions and future shock.
The project builds upon good practices in the application of EO data from the multi million pound IPP CommonSensing project and on builds on collaboration with researchers in Central/Southern Africa.