remote sensing Article Assessing the Influence of Tourism-Driven Activities on Environmental Variables on Hainan Island, China Lixia Chu 1 , Francis Oloo 1,2, Bin Chen 3, Miaomiao Xie 3 and Thomas Blaschke 1,* 1 Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics–Z_GIS, University of Salzburg, Schillerstrasse 30, 5020 Salzburg, Austria;
[email protected] (L.C.);
[email protected] (F.O.) 2 School of Surveying and Geospatial Sciences, The Technical University of Kenya, Haile Selassie Avenue, Nairobi P.O. Box 52428-00200, Kenya 3 School of Land Science and Technology, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), Haidian District, Beijing 100083, China;
[email protected] (B.C.);
[email protected] (M.X.) * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +43-662-8044-7546 Received: 4 June 2020; Accepted: 27 August 2020; Published: 30 August 2020 Abstract: Tourism is a primary socio-economic factor on many coastal islands. Tourism contributes to the livelihoods of the residents, but also influences natural resources and energy consumption and can become a significant driver of land conversion and environmental change. Understanding the influence of tourist-related activities is vital for sustainable tourism development. We chose Hainan Island in South China as a research area to study the influence of tourist-driven activities on environmental variables (as Land Surface Temperatures (LST) and related ecosystem variables) during the period of 2000 to 2019. In Hainan, the local economy relies heavily on tourism, with an ever-growing influx of tourists each year. We categorised location-based points of interest (POIs) into two classes, non-tourism sites and tourism-related sites, and utilised satellite data from the cloud-based platform Google Earth Engine (GEE) to extract LST and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data.