Landscape Drivers of Trail Formation in Peri-Urban Mountains: Insights from an Explainable Machine Learning Approach

The rapid growth of hiking tourism presents a critical challenge for balancing visitor safety with the sustainable management of ecologically fragile mountain environments. Traditional models developed in urban settings struggle to capture the highly non-linear, heterogeneous, and zero-inflated characteristics of wilderness trekking behavior. In order to quantify the nonlinear and threshold-based effects of environmental variables on hikers’ spatial decisions in unstructured wilderness and to id