The geography of natural tourist attractors in Russia

According to the Strategy of Tourism Development in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2035, ensuring the necessary diversity of forms and types of tourism is one of the important opportunities to accelerate its development and increase its role in the socio-economic development of the country. This study is based on the idea of natural tourist attractions (NTA) - objects of natural origin that have a relatively high aesthetic appeal or significance for people as a place of rest or short-term visit. This work aims to identify the distribution of natural tourist attractors in Russia according to available geospatial databases, and to assess the advantages and disadvantages of such approach. As a result, we classified on the processing of the OSM geospatial database natural tourist attractors with the indication of typical objects of each class; defined the distribution of the total number of attractors by the subjects of the Russian Federation; and grouped regions according to the potential of attractors of a similar structure. In total, 106 thousand natural attractors have been allocated in the Russian Federation, forming five classes. In absolute values, the number of attractors in the regions of the country ranges from 12381 (Krasnodar Krai) to 77 (Republic of Kalmykia) with average and median values for the subject of 1443 and 907 PTAs, respectively. Among the leading subjects in the number of PTAs are the Krasnodar Territory, the Altai Republic and the Republic of Crimea. According to the predominance of one or another class of attractors, the regions of the country form five groups, the most numerous are the subjects with a predominance in the structure of the PTA class of geological and geomorphological attractors and watercourses and land water bodies.