A New Approach to Assessing Iran’s Geomorphosites and Geosites as One of the Geopark Introducing Tools

Abstract

As a new discipline, geotourism is a part of the nature-based tourism that relies on natural resources and geology. Geosites and geomorphosites are considered as infrastructure of geodiversity by the geomorphological and geological tourists. Geotourism has formed recently and elapsed its early stages ofdevelopment. Iran is a country with a wide range of phenomena. Hence, to find the potentials for regional geotourism or capability of the geoparks, many researchers have been sought to assess the areas (of) geosites and geomorphosites in Iran, and in the world as well. The purpose of this study is to review some assessment methods of geosites and geomorphosites by 2015 and to extract their strengths and weaknesses in order to express a comprehensive method for assessing geomorphotourism areas. Analytical documents andadaptive methods are used in this research. Results of the study show that the Comanescu method is the perfect way to assess geomorphosites now. Moreover, the evaluation has been weak geomorphosites service role. Pralong, Lucie Kubalíková, Brilha and Charalampos Fassoulas methods are important in the next stage. However, in parts of the evaluation, they do not show all the potentials of a geomorphosite. Most of the methods in Iran are not in a comprehensive way to assess geomorphosites. Consequently, the present articlehas tried to propose a new method in order to maintain the strengths of the methods and reduce their weaknesses.

Keywords

• new approach
• geomorphosite
• geosite
• geotourism
• geopark