Acta Geographica Sinica ›› 2015, Vol. 70 ›› Issue (10): 1592-1605.doi: 10.11821/dlxb201510005

• Rural Settlement and Tourism Geography • Previous Articles     Next Articles

The conceptual model and characterizations of landscape genome maps of traditional settlements in China

Zui HU1,2,3(), Peilin LIU1   

  1. 1. Cooperative Innovation Center for Digitalization of Cultural Heritage in Ancient Villages and Towns, Hengyang 421002, Hunan, China
    2. Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment of Ministry of Education, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210046, China
    3. Digital Preservation Technical Engineering Institute of Traditional Settlements of Hunan Province, Hengyang 421002, Hunan, China
  • Received:2015-01-21 Revised:2015-04-14 Online:2015-10-20 Published:2015-10-20
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China, No.41171122, No.41271167, No.41201398;Key Disciplines Projects of Human Geography in Hunan Province;Natural Science Foundation of Hunan, No.12JJ7003, No.2015JJ6014

Abstract:

Thousands of traditional settlements with prominent historical and cultural information of China are considered as the Chinese traditional treasures. They play an important role in the new tide of current social-economic development and urbanization processes of China. Recently, the Landscape Gene Theory (LGT), which aims to dissect the cultural features of traditional settlements of China, is a powerful tool for a better understanding of the landscape patterns of traditional settlements and is gaining more and more attention. Plenty of prominent cultural factors derived from the traditional settlements are identified by LGT. These are very helpful knowledge about the intrinsic cultural features implicated in the traditional settlements. However, LGT does not still cope well with the co-relationships among landscape genes of traditional settlements. Therefore, LGT cannot capture the mechanisms between the prominent cultural factors and landscape images of traditional settlements. Targeted to partly resolve this issue, this paper employs methods in genome mapping of biology and LGT to integrate into a new research framework to address these mechanisms. The framework is named as Traditional Settlement Landscapes' Genome Maps (TSLGM) according to its conception and connotation. The paper is organized in the following orders. Firstly, it makes the definition and classification of TSLGM by the theoretical fundamental and essential features of LGT. Secondly, the functionalities and academic significances of TSLGM are also highlighted. Thirdly, practical flowcharts for constructing and organizing an instance of TSLGM are brought forward. Finally, 30 well-known traditional settlements of Hunan Province of China are taken as study areas. The paper portrays the spatial pattern for the 30 traditional settlements according to their TSLGM. Furthermore, a genome pattern identification of landscape genes of traditional settlements is performed by using Jinshan village of Rucheng County as an example. To sum up, this paper indicates that TSLGM plays a paramount role in capturing characteristics of the traditional settlements, which is a potential methodological progress for LGT. From this paper, it is found that TSLGM has some potential points in traditional settlement digitalization, planning pattern mining and characteristics of regional traditional landscapes identification.

Key words: genomics, traditional settlements, landscape gene, landscape genomics, genomics-graphs, China