Visitors' impacts on remote destinations: An evaluation of a Nepalese mountainous village with intense tourism activity.

Tourism universally generates benefits and costs to the destination and community. Knowledge on the impacts of tourism on local communities provides important insight in formulating strategies for long term sustainable tourism. Therefore, there is a need to evaluate the impacts of tourism before establishing/expanding the industry at a particular destination. In this study, we assessed the economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits of tourism in a remote mountainous village that experiences the high pressure of tourism activity. Data were collected for the perceived and anticipated social, economic, and environmental costs/benefits of tourism via in person interview with local residents, hotel owners, and local governmental bodies through unstructured questionnaire survey. The data were analysed using a Leopold matrix. The result revealed that tourism generates noteworthy economic and social benefits to the destination community, while environmental benefits are not obvious. The negative impacts in all the three aspects are minimal and within the threshold limit. Our quantitative assessment revealed that the net impact of tourism in Ghorepani is impressively positive (>40%). The findings of this result thus suggest that tourism is the most lucrative industry of Ghorepani and its further promotion can contribute to the broader enhancement of social and economic status of the village. This finding may have greater implications beyond the case study, and suggests that tourism if extended as the primary industry in other similar mountainous villages can play a pivotal role to enhance the socio-economic status of the country. Thus, the current findings provide important insights in formulating plans and policies for the management of sustainable tourism across the mountainous destinations.

A global perspective of the richness and evenness of traditional crop-variety diversity maintained by farming communities.

Varietal data from 27 crop species from five continents were drawn together to determine overall trends in crop varietal diversity on farm. Measurements of richness, evenness, and divergence showed that considerable crop genetic diversity continues to be maintained on farm, in the form of traditional crop varieties. Major staples had higher richness and evenness than nonstaples. Variety richness for clonal species was much higher than that of other breeding systems. A close linear relationship between traditional variety richness and evenness (both transformed), empirically derived from data spanning a wide range of crops and countries, was found both at household and community levels. Fitting a neutral "function" to traditional variety diversity relationships, comparable to a species abundance distribution of "neutral ecology," provided a benchmark to assess the standing diversity on farm. In some cases, high dominance occurred, with much of the variety richness held at low frequencies. This suggested that diversity may be maintained as an insurance to meet future environmental changes or social and economic needs. In other cases, a more even frequency distribution of varieties was found, possibly implying that farmers are selecting varieties to service a diversity of current needs and purposes. Divergence estimates, measured as the proportion of community evenness displayed among farmers, underscore the importance of a large number of small farms adopting distinctly diverse varietal strategies as a major force that maintains crop genetic diversity on farm.