IoT and AI-driven approaches to sustainable eco-tourism and cultural heritage management in Uzbekistan: Multidisciplinary frameworks and local implementation

While in many developing regions, the increasing resource strain from pressure on local infrastructure is a major concern for stakeholders and the environment, its impact on site-specific tourism dynamics may differ across regions, depending on the local context and the adaptive capacity of the institutions. We analyzed the combined effects of IoT integration, AI-based monitoring, and stakeholder collaboration and governance quality on the tourism performance, heritage preservation, and environmental sustainability, an evaluation that is restricted to the mountainous ecological corridors and heritage-rich valleys. This multidisciplinary investigation revealed heterogeneity in the relationships between technology deployment and levels of resilience across the study area over the analysis period. The trajectory of impacts from the longitudinal data set, ranging from the pre-digital phase to the post-adoption stage and seasonal variation to annual aggregation, was simulated using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) model. A regression-based hybrid method was proposed to quantify the interdependencies between ecological indicators and tourism activity. Our results showed that performance improvements can be achieved from digitally monitored interventions with targeted governance alignment. The results indicate that resilience outcomes may vary from one region to another, but communities in the same geographic cluster follow a shared trajectory in the short term.