Geoheritage, Geoparks and Geotourism

The amount of research associated with Geoheritage, Geoparks and Geotourism has increased dramatically in recent years. The current challenges faced by humanity with respect to global changes has highlighted the need to better understand our geoheritage and its place in the global nest of science. Understanding the geoheritage values of geological and geomorphological sites are an important aspect of setting geosciences to work and moving the research outputs to a field where its results are visible, used, and tested against general perceptions of the society about how the Earth works. One of the pinnacles of many geoheritage works is to develop conceptual frameworks that can be implemented in a complex conservation of geological features and landforms through a geopark at various levels of importance—from local to global. Geoparks are currently a fundamental aspect of geoconservation and locations to demonstrate how human society can live with its geoheritage toward developing a sense of our responsibility to preserve it and learn how to use our natural resources sustainably and how we can disseminate understanding various geohazards. Within this framework, geotourism is a new aspect of tourism that is currently evolving dramatically to become a potential avenue to provide alternative types of tourism such as “slow tourism”. The last two decades have clearly shown that scientific research, analysis, and comparative studies within geoheritage along with practical aspects of implementation of those results to sustainable development, geoconservation, and geotourism are urgently needed, and geoheritage research has now found an important place within geosciences.

This section of Geosciences is dedicated to the publication of any aspects relevant to geoheritage, geoparks, and geotourism. We seek high-quality descriptive works on various inventories of geosites that show the diverse and difficult methodology behind the establishment of such inventories. This section aims to accommodate this diversity and call for works to be submitted both from the perspectives of pure geological and geographical descriptions as well as from works that demonstrate the various methods applied in this context. We are looking for works that combine land use and land management techniques and adapt them for geoheritage evaluations, including advanced technologies such as geostatistics, GIS, and various techniques for the analysis of big data.

The section also calls for contributors from the traditional geoscience perspective where experts provide narrative “stories” to provide information on their pure geoscience research results and the way in which this information could be part of geoperservation, geoconservation and, ultimately, the establishment of various protected geosites and geoparks of various levels and significance.

This section is also open for the publication of philosophical works that intend to put geosciences in a global framework through Earth System approaches and explore the key elements of geodiversity in the light of current biodiversity aspects of conservation. While the analogy between biodiversity and geodiversity seems a logical idea, in reality, it is something needs to be tested, evaluated, and developed further. Such novel approaches to express geodiversity, which combine various disciplines, test it, and demonstrate its validity are very welcome in this section.

Current aspects of geoethics and its role in geoconservation are under heated discussion; this section would like to call forward authors faced with such challenges.

This section also wishes to publish works that are more practical and provide information and ways to promote geotourism. Works that are the result of a synergy of geoscientists, land managers, engineers, planners, geographers, archaeologists, and social scientists are most welcome in this section to provide a broad discussion forum over geoheritage, geoparks, and geotourism among geoscientists and allow the global readership of Geosciences to partake in this journey.