Ecotourism with a Hand Lens

"Ecotourism with a Hand Lens" is a term coined by Dr. Ricardo Rozzi and  colleagues to refer to a new speciality tourism being promoted in the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve. Given the discovery of the archipelago's outstanding diversity of mosses, lichens and liverworts (5% of the world's total), Rozzi proposes that tourism operators incorporate this narrative into their offering for the region and take advantage of this biodiversity hotspot for non-vascular flora.

In turn, Rozzi and the Omora Ethnobotanical Park have metaphorically called these small plant communities the "Miniature Forests of Cape Horn" to help the broader society understand the ecological role played by these tiny, but diverse, abundant and important organisms. In the Magellanic Subantarctic ecoregion, the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve and the Chilean Antarctic Peninsula, the number of foreign tourists has doubled in the last decade, with nature tourism being the principal attraction for visitors to the region. With the aim of preventing negative impacts of tourism activity on the biological and cultural diversity, and to contribute to sustainable tourism the Sub-Antarctic Biocultural Conservation Program at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park, in collaboration with local actors, has developed the field environmental philosophy methodological approach.