Environmental Carrying Capacity Assessment for Coastal Tourism Hub in Sekotong, West Lombok

Coastal tourism is a tourism market segment that is increasing in popularity. The said increase happened due to coastal destinations’ ability to give visitors a tranquil and isolated atmosphere. This trend often triggered excessive coastal developments that could strain and cause irreparable damage to the local coastal ecosystem. Previous findings stated that a local environmental carrying capacity assessment needs to be formulated before a physical development can be exercised. Sekotong is a district in West Lombok that has the potential to be developed as a coastal tourism hub. It is located by the Lombok Strait that has good surfing waves and a beautiful seascape. This region is projected to experience a drastic visitor increase in the coming years. These potentials and increasing visitor number projections could attract physical development interests in the future. This study aims to assess local environmental carrying capacity, especially regarding coastal tourism activities. A quantitative approach utilizing statistical data and remote sensing tools is done to assess the physical and real carrying capacity models. The assessment shows that the study area can endure tourism development that is aimed to satisfy 3.087,57 individuals. This number represents the local ecosystem’s limit to endure future development plans and is expected to be referenced in future physical development plans in Sekotong. This study is also hoped to contribute to local coastal environment sustainability.


Introduction
Coastal tourism is increasing in popularity due to it giving an opposing ambient from the urban environment.Natural coastal tourism is said to give remote and segregate ambience from daily urban activities [1][2][3].Previous research found that tourism contributed to more than 10% of the total global GDP [4].This popularity invites amenity developments to coastal areas worldwide [5,6].Developers and governments seek to satisfy the demands for recreational sites through investments and incentives [7].Resorts, beach clubs, and seaports are built in response to increasing investments poured to develop the coastal areas [8,9].
The development of coastal tourism is usually followed by increasing intensity of economic activities within them [10].Previous research found that the tourism sector contributes more than 10% of the total global GDP [4].Some nations, especially in small island regions, can even be considered reliant on the tourism sector [11].Tourism developments made coastal areas an economic hub that is 1264 (2023) 012005 IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1315/1264/1/012005 2 able to attract people to set their livelihood.Such circumstances can be reflected in the local economic scene.The increasing intensity of coastal development tends to make local economic activities lean on coastal tourism [12].Local cultures and wisdom are often sidelined by the local communities in favour of satisfying the tourism demands [11].In consequence, the native cultures and wisdom can potentially be faded as the fruitage of the tourism economic developments [11,13,14].
Environmental degradation is another effect of the increasing economic activities in coastal areas [8].Coastal ecosystems are found to be fragile and tend to be easily disrupted by intense disruption [14][15][16].The increasing coastal developments can impact the local ecosystem negatively while benefiting economically [8,12,17].Excessive tourism development contributed to coastal habitat destruction and biomass reduction [18,19].
Sekotong is an emerging coastal tourism destination in Lombok Island, Indonesia [20].Its native ecosystem, landscape, and culture are contributing factors to tourist attraction [20,21].Sekotong's coastal area boasts an extensive variety of tropical flora and fauna.Professional and amateur surfers frequently visit its seas because it has waves that are very suitable for surfing [22].It is also the native home of the Sasak tribe which has unique cultural activities and architecture.
The government of Indonesia has designated Sekotong as a supporting region for the Special Economic District in Mandalika [23].This function directed Sekotong to provide lodgings and alternative tourism destinations for tourists should Mandalika become exhausted from such provisions.The needs to improve accessibility to the major cities and other tourism hubs also emerges following this agenda [24,25].While it is important to generate economic profits, the conservation of ecosystems, landscapes, and cultures is also critical to maintaining Sekotong's attraction as a tourism destination.A previous finding said that exclusivity is a critical key to environmental sustainability [2].It is critical to limit the number of visitors to maintain local sustainability [26][27][28].To maintain their economic value while maintaining sustainability, the equilibrium of coastal sustainability and tourism profits needs to be estimated.Previous research has mentioned the use of carrying capacity estimation to measure said equilibrium [29,30].
The direction of future development in Sekotong can put its local ecosystem, landscape, and culture at risk [31][32][33][34][35]. Disruptions of those native elements can spoil tourist attractions that it is meant to have in the first place.A study regarding local carrying capacity needs to be done to estimate the limit of services that can be given to future visitors.This research aims to estimate the limit of visitors able to be satisfied their needs in Sekotong.It is hoped that this research can contribute to the present and future conservation efforts in Sekotong.

Research Site
The research site took place on a plot of land owned by PT Bangko-bangko Sejati in Sekotong, a subdistrict on the edge of West Lombok.It has a total area of 75,05 hectares.This land is part of a conservative area named TWA Bangko-bangko.It is the native habitat of rare biota such as eagles, kingfishers, teals, and waru.A decree from the Ministry of Forestry allowed the land to be managed by private parties and utilized it as a sustainable tourism destination.Taking its status as the natural habitat of rare biota into account, estimating the number of maximum visitors is vital to maintain natural sustainability.Figure 1 is the map of the study area.

Research Methods
This research utilizes photogrammetry approaches to acquire orthophoto data and literature study to estimate climate phenomenon, demographic conditions, and urban design requirements.The orthophoto data are used to generate slope and land cover models.These models are required to digitize physical attributes of the study area.Digital spatial models are essential for this research for its ability to be formulated with another form of data such as statistical data.A physical carrying capacity estimation is then generated from the spatial and statistical data aforementioned.This estimation is formulated further with physical, climate, and demographic data to generate a more representative real carrying capacity estimation.Figure 2 below is the overview of workflow in this research.

High-Resolution Images Utilization in Environmental Carrying Capacity Estimation
This research utilizes high-resolution, remotely sensed images to model the study area's physical features.The image is acquired using passive remote sensing approaches by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).The acquired data comes in the form of multiband images with 4 cm resolution and point cloud data.The point clouds can be further used to generate a terrain model with a 15 cm resolution.The availability of high-resolution images and a terrain model means made the generation of a detailed 3D model of the study area possible [27,36,37].
The multiband images acquired are used mainly to identify the physical features of the study area such as land cover types and slopes [38].Those features are affecting the area's ability to satisfy visitors' needs by increasing or decreasing the environmental carrying capacity [10,29,30].These factors are mainly utilized in estimating the real carrying capacity as complementing factors.High-resolution image utilization in this research is hoped to increase the quality of the land cover classification and slope modeling [27,39,40].

Environmental Carrying Capacity Estimation
Estimating the amount of total capacity of service based on the natural features of the study area is the main aim of this analysis.The analysis in this research is done in two steps consisting of physical and real carrying capacity estimation.Physical carrying capacity (PCC) is a raw estimation of how many people can fulfill their needs in a certain area.This estimation is based on the total area available divided by the average area needed by certain activities per person [29,30].Physical carrying capacity is estimated using this formula below: where, PCC is physical carrying capacity, A is total area, a is area needed per person, Rt is total working hours, Rn is average visiting hours.
where, Rcc is real carrying capacity, Cf1 is complementing factor 1 (area ratio of lands < 15 degrees to total area), Cf2 is complementing factor 2 (Percentage of sunny days per year), Cf3 is complementing factor 3 (Ratio between non-water body cover area to total area), Cf4 is complementing factor 4 (ratio between non-forest cover area to total area).

Natural Features Model Acquired from High-Resolution Remotely-Sensed Images
Detailed mapping of the area is done to acquire point clouds and multiband image data.Those data are then processed to generate a detailed 3-dimensional spatial model as shown in Figure 3.The model is utilized to identify local ecosystem landscape in an effort to maintain its sustainability [18,19].It can be concluded in plain view that the area has a hilly relief in the middle and tends to be flatter to the edge.The area has natural land cover such as forest and thick bushes and manmade land cover such as agricultural lands.There are no permanent human settlements recorded in the image.Although, nonpermanent settlements in the form of tents and huts can be identified particularly in the agricultural lands.Further analysis shows that agricultural lands are the majority land cover of the area (Figure 4).The agricultural lands are mostly located on the edges that have flatter slopes compared to the centre (Figure 5).Forest lands are located in the centre surrounded and/or attached to the barren lands.This phenomenon might indicate that deforestation occurs to favour the development of agricultural lands [26,27].The deforestation hypothesis is backed by the image of the barren lands consisting of downed canopy vegetations that construct the forest lands (Figure 6).Continued deforestation can disrupt the effort to conserve the sustainability of the local ecosystem [26,28].Further research regarding deforestation in TWA Bangko-bangko using multitemporal images needs to be done to back this hypothesis and to recommend a deforestation mitigation plan.

Physical Carrying Capacity
A physical carrying capacity analysis to estimate the raw number of visitors is done in this research.The total area needed per person is estimated from previous studies regarding coastal tourism development.Previous studies are used to map out the type of amenities needed for coastal developments.The amenities needed for coastal tourism according to previous studies are lodgings, restaurants, fitness facilities, outbound areas, public open spaces, beach area, cultural stage, parking areas, utilities, and securities [41][42][43][44].Estimated numbers of areas needed per person are then acquired by referring the type of amenities to Neufert Architect Data.Table 1 shows the estimation of the PCC.
Maximum number of visitors estimated from the PCC analysis amount to 112.584,54 individuals.It is found to be relatively bigger compared to the previous related research [30].The larger number of visitors is due to the larger size of the study area (242.280square meters to 750.563,57 square meters).The characteristic of coastal tourism that can be enjoyed a day round also contributed to longer total working hours and average visiting hours compared to other types of tourism.A combination of the factors multiplied by the large available area resulted in a large number of estimated maximum visitors [29,30].

Real Carrying Capacity
The abundance of hilly terrain limits the amount of areas considered ideal for development in the study area [45].This condition can be seen by the slope percentage model in Figure 5.The hilly landscape in the centre concentrated the flat areas on the edges of the land.It can also be seen from the picture that the flatter areas are located on the upper parts of the land.The southern part's remoteness from the road network should also be put into consideration [24,25].Flattening and road construction projects need to be done if the southern parts are intended to be developed.
Hilly terrain contributes to the scarcity of built-up areas that contributes to local ecosystem sustainability [33][34][35].Agricultural development on the other hand can be a concerning factor to the existence of local forest lands [31,32].An observation done in the area shows that the agricultural lands have a slightly bigger area compared to the forest lands.If the hypothesis of deforestation happening in the area is proven correct, the viability of local biota can be of concern [26][27][28].This research is putting local ecosystem sustainability into consideration by not including forest lands as potential developing areas.Therefore, the total area considered feasible to be developed is 45,62 Ha (consisting only barren lands and agricultural lands).
Sekotong has a dry climate according to the local Meteorological, Climatological, and Geophysical Agency [46].It has an average precipitation rate of 0-100 mm/month which is lower than the national average rate (245 mm/month).In total, Sekotong experienced 115 rainy days out of 365 days a year.The dry climate can be considered good from the tourism point of view.The drier the climate means the more the sunny days.Sekotong usually endured rainy seasons during the first and fourth quarters of the year.Dry climates also made Sekotong rarely experience extreme weather.It can be concluded that climate works in favour of Sekotong's tourism development.Real carrying capacity estimation shows that the maximum number of visitors able to be serviced amounts to 3.087,57 individuals.The number shows a 97,26% decrease from the PCC estimation.This finding is parallel to previous studies that also show declining estimated numbers after factoring in physical features [30].Land slopes contribute as the most deducting factor compared to the others.It limits the usage of development lands to under 0,65% of the total area.Land covers contribute as the second most influential factor that limits the development to be done outside the forest lands and water body areas.Although the number of maximum visitors is already estimated, the threshold can still be engineered to a certain desired amount without disturbing the equilibrium [10].Increasing the amounts of flat grounds in the non-forest lands is a plausible alternative.

Conclusion
This research has successfully estimated the maximum number of visitors able to be satisfied by future tourism development in the study area.It is estimated that a total of 3.087,57 individuals can enjoy tourism services without disturbing the sustainability of local ecosystems.This research also has given recommendations to increase the number of visitors threshold by increasing the area of flat grounds in the non-forest lands.These findings can be utilized as input for future sustainable coastal tourism developments.
This research also found an indication of possible deforestation.Further research in the future needs to be done to prove this hypothesis.Utilization of multitemporal remotely-sensed data needs to be acquired to fulfil this purpose.Said purpose can be hindered by data availability.This can be overcome by acquiring open-source data.Using a broader study area can be the alternative to open-source data limitation in spatial resolution.Future research should study the whole TWA Bangko-bangko area instead of only researching the present study area.Thus, the hypothesis of deforestation can be proven, monitored, and given recommendations.
The unavailability of trendline data limits the depth of discussion of this research.The estimated number of visitors cannot be compared to existing figures because tourism activities are almost nonexistent at the present.Referring to previous studies, the comparison can be done in the future after the development is finished and significant tourism activities are documented.Future studies can observe the continuity of tourism development and environmental sustainability by referring to this research as point zero.

Table 2
below shows the RCC calculations according to the findings above: