marine cruising capability

First, the areas where resources essential to the chosen tourism product (such as heli-hiking) are
located must be identified. “Next, the model uses elements of the natural setting to assess the quality of
heli-hiking possible on the remaining land area. Factors influencing the quality of the product include
the nature of the terrain (for example, are extensive views possible), the presence of scenic features
such as lakes, ice fields and waterfalls, the opportunity for wildlife viewing, and the presence of
cultural/heritage features.”44 Intermediate analysis coverages are the second stage of the modelling
process. “In some cases, preliminary analysis of raw data is required in order to make this data useful
for modelling tourism capability. A good example of this was the scenic data. Raw scenic data includes
information on the degree and type of alteration to the landscape, water influence and type, vegetation,
etc. In this case, an intermediate analysis was done to produce a coverage which classifies the landscape
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as having a high, moderate or low scenic quality.” Intermediate analysis coverages combine
biogeoclimatic (soils, vegetation), scenic (forest cover, rivers, and topography), basemap (lakes),
geological features, fisheries, bird, mammal, heritage data, and wildlife data such as (wildlife viewing
sites). Each of these coverages relates to a specific tourism product model such as the heli-hiking
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model. Within the B.C. context, tourism capability models have been implemented for a wide variety
of tourism products or activities such as hiking, mountain biking, downhill skiing, snowmobiling, day
sport fishing, wildlife viewing, heli-hiking, natural tours, day kayaking, marinas, bicycling touring, and
heli-skiing.47
The final stage of development was the resource coverage step. These coverages consist of
natural and cultural resources that support the range of tourism products to be modelled. These resource
coverages are a combination of geological, water, biogeoclimatic zones, fisheries, mammal, wildlife
habitat and viewing sites, scenic, coastal water depth, coastal exposure, shoreline, coastal fisheries,
and forest cover data. In many of the individual tourism product capability models, scenery aspects
were addressed by the specific inclusion of biogeoclimatic data.
Biogeoclimatic data includes important natural resource information such as geological, soils,
vegetation, and climatic data (duration of snow and annual snowfall, terrain access, views, and other
climatic elements like chance of both summer and winter precipitation). Biogeoclimatic data was
obtained from the B.C. Ministry of Forest and this data provided information useful to the scenic
component that was vital to many of the tourism product capability models. This biogeoclimatic data
and the scenic models can be broken into data concerning road-based activities (near built-up areas) and
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back country activities (wilderness areas). Once the data was divided into the three levels of coverages
(capability, intermediate analysis, and resource) and the three coverage types (point, line, and polygon)
then the tourism capability models are created in ArcInfo at a scale of 1: 250, 000 in using a MELP
(Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks) Albers projection, NAD83.49