Bridging digital Territorial Intelligence and Community-Based Biodiversity Stewardship in Rural Tourism: Evidence from Two Model European Projects for Sustainable Tourism
Sandra Lund, Yoanna Ivanova and Valentin Lazarov*
ABSTRACT
Rural regions across Europe hold significant biodiversity, agroecological knowledge, and cultural heritage assets that remain largely invisible to formal biodiversity monitoring systems and disconnected from mainstream tourism markets. This paper presents two complementary transnational initiatives, first described at BEeS 2026 (The LifeWatch ERIC Biodiversity and Ecosystem eScience Conference, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 7–10 July 2026), that use digital innovation and community-based self-assessment to help close this gap: 1. The Baltic-to-Balkan (B2B) Green Corridor connects rural tourism SMEs across Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Romania, and Sweden through a GeoAI platform combining large language models, geospatial data, GIS tools, and retrieval-augmented generation; these elements enabling multilingual discovery of tourism assets, thematic clustering of natural and cultural resources, identification of under-visited territories, and integration of sustainability indicators aligned with the EU Twin Transition agenda. 2. The Living Ruralities Villages Route, piloted across Bulgaria, Greece, Ireland, and Italy, applies the ECO-SEAL framework-a progressive sustainability self-assessment and peer-learning tool — to generate structured, FAIR-compatible data on biodiversity awareness, local sourcing, water stewardship, waste reduction, and ecosystem-sensitive visitor management among rural tourism operators. Read together, the two initiatives illustrate complementary top-down (geospatial, AI-driven territorial intelligence) and bottom-up (community-generated stewardship data) pathways to addressing Europe's rural, community-scale biodiversity data gap, with clear potential for integration into research infrastructures such as LifeWatch ERIC. The paper discusses the conceptual and methodological convergence of the two approaches, their current stage of piloting rather than full-scale deployment, and the governance, data-quality, and scalability considerations that would need to be addressed before their outputs could be considered a mature contribution to the European biodiversity data ecosystem.
