Conceptualising Tourism Sustainability and Operationalising Its Assessment: Evidence from a Mediterranean Community of Projects

Sustainable tourism development is considered an essential challenge for improving resource management in coastal and maritime areas. In this context, various initiatives have been developed for facilitating the assessment and monitoring of tourism sustainability. Nevertheless, the perception of sustainability varies across different tourism stakeholders, since they approach tourism development under different perspectives while the issue of data availability has been a great barrier in measuring sustainability. The present paper examines the perceptions of sustainability observed over a Community of projects with the common aim of enhancing coastal and maritime tourism sustainability at the Mediterranean. Based on surveys, the Community of projects conceptualizes sustainability, reveals their own strategies in operationalizing sustainability assessment and evaluates the usefulness and the main gaps of various sustainability assessment toolkits. The findings of the study signify that tourism sustainability is a broad concept allowing for different interpretations. The assessment of sustainability seems to be affected by the perception and weight attributed to the economic, social, environmental, and governance pillar of sustainability by each project. Finally, the applicability of international assessment toolkits could be questioned as these do not reflect the objectives of the projects and tailored made approaches are considered as essential for operationalizing sustainability assessments.

Predicting abundances of plants and pollinators using a simple compartmental mutualistic model

Key gaps to be filled in population and community ecology are predicting the strength of species interactions and linking pattern with process to understand species coexistence and their relative abundances. In the case of mutualistic webs, like plant–pollinator networks, advances in understanding species abundances are currently limited, mainly owing to the lack of methodological tools to deal with the intrinsic complexity of mutualisms. Here, we propose an aggregation method leading to a simple compartmental mutualistic population model that captures both qualitatively and quantitatively the size-segregated populations observed in a Mediterranean community of nectar-producing plant species and nectar-searching animal species. We analyse the issue of optimal aggregation level and its connection with the trade-off between realism and overparametrization. We show that aggregation of both plants and pollinators into five size classes or compartments leads to a robust model with only two tunable parameters. Moreover, if, in each compartment, (i) the interaction coefficients fulfil the condition of weak mutualism and (ii) the mutualism is facultative for at least one party of the compartment, then the interactions between different compartments are sufficient to guarantee global stability of the equilibrium population.