Examining the Effective Factors on Increasing Demand for Bird-watching Tourism ( A Case Study of Miankaleh Wetland; Mazandaran Province)

Bird-watching has become one of the important and growing aspects of ecotourism. Thus ecotourism as a new approach of nature-based tourism is of significant importance in many countries during recent decades. Iran with its various environments especially its wetlands is the home for the two third of the different spices of birds in the middle east. However its share of these birds is so limited compared with other countries. The purpose of the present study was to emphasize the development of bird-watching as a protective approach of the birds’ home in wetlands and also to focus on the analysis of bird-watching tourist attraction in Miankaleh wetland as an important wetland areas in the world. The population of the study included the bird-watching tourists visiting Miankaleh in 1395. In order to analyze the obtained data, a t-test was ran using the SPSS software. In the study, the effect of marketing factors in tourist attraction was determined and using Friedman test the factors were prioritized. The results of the study showed that however all of the mentioned factors were effective in tourist attraction, their order from the tourists’ viewpoints was significant too.