Nature Conservation and Sustainable Tourism in a Former Baltic Sea Coastal Military Area

The coastal zone consists of diverse littoral habitats, which we categorize into two primary types: linear and areal. Investigating linear littoral habitats is crucial for resolving the ‘coastal squeeze’ phenomenon in coastal and marine protected areas and in seaside resorts. Our research aims to identify the critical conditions for the conversion of defunct seaside military training areas as brownfields into coastal protected areas and small-scale seaside resorts and their sustainable planning and management. The development of seaside tourism facilities is taking place both on the coast and in the hinterland, but the coast is used for tourism much more intensively than the hinterland. It is challenging to ‘pull’ tourists away from the linear beach to the areal hinterland. We argue that the distinctiveness of the resource use conflicts in coastal and hinterland tourism lies in an essential difference between the system’s linear and areal littoral habitats, as 78% of summer visitors in Pajūris Regional Park in Lithuania come for active leisure in nature. The results of our study show that combining the GIS interpretation algorithms, supported by the innovative conjoining of DPSIR and Delphi analytical tools, ensures site-tailored integrated management of the linear waterfront and the areal hinterland.