Tourism geography, which emerged during the great development of applied geography in the 1980s, cannot now sufficiently support the rapid development of tourist industry due to its short period of development and insufficient theoretical and methodological systems. Therefore, the development of tourist industry urgently needs the knowledge of related more developed disciplines. Phenology is a branch of geography that has an intersection with tourism geography, and it has a very close relationship with tourist industry. The paper systematically reviews the role of phenology in supporting the tourism system, its applications in five specific industrial fields, the role in promoting six dimensions of the high-quality development of tourism, and the influence of climate change on phenological tourism resources and related industries. The analysis shows that: (1) The concept of phenology can help to integrate the tourism resources of natural, human, and social elements in the tourism system. The application of phenology in the tourism industry can effectively improve the service support sub-systems, transportation sub-systems, and medical and health sub-system. (2) The practical application of phenology in the tourist industry mainly involves plant landscape design, determination of ornamental tourism season, ornamental phenology forecasting, time planning for eco-tourism activities, pollen concentration forecasting, ice and snow disaster warning, and tourist route design. (3) Phenology supports six dimensions of high-quality development of tourism, including element, industry, process, time and space, direction, and participating sector. (4) Phenological tourism resources and related industrial links are sensitive to climate change. In the future, studies should focus on the risks of climate change in different climate scenarios and in-depth analysis of the influences on the perceptions and behavior of tourists. Phenological change should be integrated into medium and long-term industrial development plans and industry reports. From the perspectives of disciplinary development and industrial application, phenology can provide theoretical basis for tourism research, as well as practical guidance for the sustainable development of tourism in the context of climate change.
This study uses logical analysis and literature review methods to sort out overseas sport tourism research, focusing on the definition, classification, research fields, research methods, and research theories of sport tourism, and proposes a prospect for future sport tourism research. Findings show that: (1) In terms of sport tourism definition, foreign scholars have not reached an agreement on the definition of sport tourism. The divergence between "genus concept" and "species concept" of sport tourism contributes to the differences in definitions. (2)In the research on the classification of sport tourism, foreign scholars have obtained different results based on different classification standards. At present, scholars mainly use activity types, consumer needs, consumer intention, and willingness as classification standards, which has great limitations. (3) In the field of sport tourism research, popular fields can be categorized into six dimensions: sports, events, development process, space, influence, and stakeholders; emerging fields attracted attention on China and sustainable development. In terms of the future of sport tourism research, scholars need to conduct more problem-oriented interdisciplinary research, expand sport tourism research fields, and further apply the overseas sport tourism experience to the development of sport tourism in China.
Festivals are not only cultural activities but also important tourist attractions, which possess both objective and symbolic properties. The purpose of this paper is to explore the production process of the symbolization of festival tourist attractions from the perspective of organizers based on semiotic theory. The meeting minutes and interview data of the organizers were collected. The data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach, which includes three steps to explore tourism symbolization production: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Findings show festival attractiveness, festival organization and management, festival planning concept, and festivalscape respectively constitute the basis, path, idea, and content of symbolization production of festival tourist attractions. More specifically, festival organizers, based on their understanding of festival attractiveness, motivate multiple departments, establish a clear organizational structure, and uphold the planning concepts, including promoting traditional culture, focusing on cultural innovation, keeping up with national strategies, conforming to the trend of the times, etc. In addition, they create a festivalscape composed of security, program performance, creative interaction, gourmet snacks, trade fairs, personnel services, auxiliary facilities, and festival atmosphere. This festivalscape is flexible, diverse, and highly creative, which condenses the cultural connotation of the festival. The organizer can continuously adjust it to reflect the uniqueness of the festival culture to enhance the experience of tourists.
Linear cultural heritage is a special type of heritage. Along with the improved understanding of heritage integrity and growing awareness of heritage reuse and utilization, linear cultural heritage tourism is becoming increasingly important. Therefore, promoting the awareness of linear cultural heritage and grasping the characteristics of linear cultural heritage become key issues in encouraging linear cultural heritage utilization and sustainable linear cultural heritage tourism development. World heritage sites are unique tourism resources that can meet multiple tourism demands. Using the linear cultural heritage data from the World Heritage List, this study analyzed the linear cultural heritage characteristics including category and inclusion criteria, resource combination patterns, and core zones and buffer zones. This study also analyzed the influences of linear cultural heritage characteristics on tourism utilization from the aspects of spatial evolution and tourism reuse. The results show that the development of tourism spatial structure followed the rule of “growth pole.” Moreover, there were different paths for reutilization and activation in terms of cultural stratification of heritage.
Residents' environmental behavior in tourist destinations is an essential segment of environmental behavior research in tourism context. This paper provides a review on the literature of residents' environmental behavior in tourist destinations, including research progress, research contents and research methods. Results show that: (1) Research on the residents' environmental behavior in tourist destinations started late, and experienced three stages: infancy stage（2002—2004）, initial stage (2005—2013), and development stage (2014—2020). There are few research in China and abroad, but research abroad is ahead of those in China. (2) The definition of residents' environmental behavior in tourist destinations is not unified, as well as the lack of measurement scale development. The investigation of factors that influence residents' environmental behavior in tourist destinations gained much attention, but the formation mechanism and predictive research are relatively overlooked. (3) The research method used to study residents' environmental behavior in tourist destinations is unitary. Specifically, data collection is mainly questionnaire survey, supplemented by semi-structured interview. Data analysis heavily relies on structural equation model. Based on these, this paper analyzed the insufficiency of the existing research from the research angle, research content and research method, and proposed future research directions for residents' environmental behavior in tourist destinations to provide useful guidance for environmental management of tourist destinations.
Interpretation is important in environmental education in the context of ecotourism. Anthropomorphic interpretation presents the content in a more vivid way, which may improve environmental education perceptions of tourists. This study adopted situational experiment method to explore the influence of anthropomorphic interpretation on environmental education. Random experiment was used in this study, and personal cognitive style was taken into consideration. The empirical dataset contains four sets of questionnaires (with personification videos, no anthropomorphic video, anthropomorphic audio, no anthropomorphic audio, respectively). The survey was conducted through four ways of internet survey websites. A total of 673 questionnaires were collected. According to the experimental requirements, 400 samples with completed information were randomly selected as valid sample. The results show that both visual and auditory anthropomorphic interpretation have significant impacts on environmental education. Participants' cognitive style plays a moderating role in anthropomorphic interpretation and environmental education. The effect of cognitive style was significant on visual anthropomorphic interpretation but insignificant on auditory anthropomorphic interpretation. This study contributes to the mechanism research on anthropomorphic interaction and environmental education. This study insights environmental education research that the means of interpretation are of importance. It takes diversified and personalized interpretation demands into consideration, which is valuable for improving tourism interpretation in ecotourism.
Tourist environmentally responsible behavior is of great significance for the sustainable development of rural tourism and the sustainable poverty alleviation of rural residents. Based on the theory of emotional solidarity, this study explores the predictive effect of tourists’ emotional solidarity on their environmentally responsible behavior. Taking the traditional villages in southeastern Shanxi Province as a case study, this paper uses qualitative and quantitative research methods to test the dimensions of tourists' environmentally responsible behavior and the existence of the influencing path of "emotional solidarity- environmentally responsible behavior". The results show that: (1) In the context of traditional villages' homestay inn, tourist environmentally responsible behavior includes not only ecological environmentally responsible behavior, but also social and economic environmentally responsible behavior. (2) The emotional solidarity between tourists and homestay inn owners can significantly affect tourist environmentally responsible behavior, and the ranking of influence significance is ecological, social, and economic environmentally responsible behavior. (3) The influencing significance ranking of the three second-order constructs of emotional solidarity on tourist environmentally responsible behavior is sympathetic understanding, emotional closeness, and felling welcomed. The research expands the application scope of the theory of emotional solidarity, provides a new perspective for the research of tourists' environmentally responsible behavior, and also provides practical enlightenment for rural tourism destinations to stimulate tourist environmentally responsible behavior.
Recreation zoning control for the purpose of utilization is an important measure for national parks to achieve sustainable development. are crucial f Based on the field investigation in Canada and the review on Canadian literature, this paper analyzes the recreation space control system and its key concerns at the national level, park level, and subdivision level. The guiding idea and adaptive strategies were also discussed in this paper. Results show that: (1) In Canada, recreation space control system of national park performs in three scales: region, park, and site, which illustrates the systematic thinking in promoting national land protection; (2) Governance mechanisms of national park recreation function in different levels. Mechanisms include the macroscopic equilibrium of land ecological security and recreation development, the display of national image with characteristics and the optimization of landscape conservation classification, the utilization control based on ecological importance. The governance of national park recreation is a vertical management system that applies corresponding control measures in different scales to achieve sustainable development; (3) In terms of policy, the recreation space governance model for national parks should maintain a balance between natural protection and the space utilization of human activity. In terms of uniqueness, it should show a neutral way of thinking that is different from the strictest protection and over-development. These development experiences from Canada have great application significance for us to establish our national park system. We should pay attention to dynamic regulation to avoid system turning rigid. We should also establish multi-level pre-assessment and flexible measures for optimization.
Mountain scenic area is important destinations to tourists, in which the activities are related to the safety of mountain ecosystem. Constructing ecological security pattern in mountain scenic area is important for protecting key species in the ecosystem and maintaining the overall function of the ecosystem. It is also an important guarantee for the sustainable development of the scenic area. This study chose Yunqiu Mountain Scenic Area as a case study and representative rare animal - Crossoptilon Mantchuricum in Lvliang mountains as study objects. GIS method was used to extract the ecological source areas of Crossoptilon Mantchuricum. Ecological corridors were identified, and ecological network was constructed using Minimum Cumulative Resistance (MCR) model and gravity model. Moreover, the connectivity and sensitivity of the ecological network were analyzed and suggestions for optimization were proposed. The results show that: the overall size of the Yunqiu Mountain ecological source area is relatively small, and the spatial distribution is uneven. There is a medium level of network connectivity, at the center of which there are many corridors between source areas, forming a mash-shape connection. While corridors between source areas on the edge of the network are simple, forming a tree-shape connection. According to the sensitivity evaluation criteria, the scenic area is divided into extremely sensitive area, highly sensitive area, moderately sensitive area, slightly sensitive area, and insensitive area. The overall sensitivity of the area where the ecological network locates is low, but there still exist high-risk nodes. Considering the different sensitivity levels of areas where the ecological network locates, this paper proposes three suggestions for optimization: Interference Reduction Protection, Recovery Protection, and Construction Protection. This research provides scientific-basis for protecting the ecology of the Yunqiu Mountain Scenic Area.
This study takes the social network of female residents in Wulingyuan world heritage site community as research object. Questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview were conducted. Quantitative data collected through sampling questionnaire and qualitative analysis using snowball interview were adopted to study the female residents in Yuanjiajie village, Longweiba village, and Maishan village in Wulingyuan district. Results from network scale, network centrality, and network density analysis show that the social network scale, social network connection, and social network structure of female residents in Wulingyuan world natural heritage site are significantly different, influenced by the degree of ecotourism development. The participation in ecotourism is highly correlated with the social network of female residents, which directly affects the scale, connection, and structure of social network. Under the influence of ecotourism, some conclusions can be drawn as follow: (1) the social communication scope of female residents has been gradually expanded, and the scale of social network has been significantly increased. (2) the social relations of female residents have been gradually diversified and the social network connections have been increasingly rich. (3) the female residents have obtained heterogeneous information and resources, and the social network structure is gradually becoming stable. (4) the tourism rights and interests of female residents are obviously enhanced, which promotes the continuous optimization of women's social network.
Ecotourism plays an important role in optimizing industrial structure, encouraging regional sustainable development, and promoting ecological conservation. Taking Huangshan Mountain scenic area as a case for studying mountain ecotourism: Firstly we introduce the abundant ecotourism resources in Huangshan Mountain scenic area, including wild animals and plants, famous and ancient trees; Secondly, we comb the relevant measures that are taken to promote ecotourism development regarding ecotourists, resources, enterprises, and environment in Huangshan Mountain scenic area, including the determination of reasonable carrying capacity of scenic spots, the closure of the elite scenic spots, the regularly protection of ancient and famous trees, the effective prevention and control of pine wood nematode disaster, the strict prevention of forest fires, the reform of eco-tourism enterprises and the scientific management of 'three waste' and so on; Thirdly, we discuss the economic, social, and ecological benefits of ecotourism development in Huangshan Mountain scenic area, its benefits have the spillover of time and space, which is playing an important role in promoting the sustainable development of domestic and foreign tourism destinations. Huangshan Mountain scenic area is an excellent example of ecotourism development in China, its unique ecotourism preservation and practice measures on regional development, legislation, and multi-stakeholder participation provide valuable experiences for the ecotourism development in the same type of scenic areas in China and abroad.
