Exploring the historical evolution of tourism-environment interaction in protected area: A case study of Mt. Bogda

doi:10.1007/s11442-022-1941-5

Abstract

Abstract:

Protected areas have a double mandate of both “protection” and “use.” Nature- based tourism is considered an effective tool in terms of environmental conservation. Understanding the causes and consequences of a spatiotemporal succession of tourism construction is an important channel to explore the changes of tourism-environment interaction in the protected area. To analyze the spatio-temporal variations in tourism construction lands, we adopted Mt. Bogda as an example. We systematically quantified the interaction between these changes and environmental variables and explored the evolution process of tourism-environment interaction of the mountainous protected area in the northwest arid region. Our results revealed the following: (1) In the Bogda protected area, the proportion of tourism construction lands first appeared to be increasing, then decreasing dramatically, and finally growing slowly. The spatial expansion of tourism construction lands followed the “core-periphery” pattern, respectively showing shapely infilling, reasonable agglomeration, barycenter shift, and outlying growth from 1990 to 2018 as the stages of concentrating on the core. (2) The higher land-use intensity of tourism construction drove the changes of landscape fragmentation, diversity, stability, primitive, and nature degree in the protected area. The coupling coordination between tourism and the environment in the Bogda area decreased at first, and then slowly increased. Meanwhile, tourism did not cause irreversible damage to the natural environment, and the coupling coordination degree between tourism and the environment was still in the state of balanced development. It expressed the states of original balanced, development exceeds environment and barely balanced, and superiorly balanced. The historical evolution of tourism-environment interaction in Bogda reflects the pattern of periodic changes in China’s protected areas to a certain extent.

Key words: tourism-environment interaction, mountain world natural heritage site, land use and land cover, coupling coordination of tourism-environment

PAN Xumei, YANG Zhaoping, HAN Fang. Exploring the historical evolution of tourism-environment interaction in protected area: A case study of Mt. Bogda[J].Journal of Geographical Sciences, 2022, 32(1): 177-192.

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Subsystem	First-class index	Second-class index	Weight	Description
Tourism T(x)	Tourism scale	Number of maximum daily tourists (x₁, +)	0.159	Reflecting the scale of tourism
		Developed tourism attractions (x₂, +)	0.164	Reflecting the intensity of tourists’ activities
		Road density (x₃, +)	0.103	Reflecting the activity area for tourists
		Floor area ratio (x₄, +)	0.127	Reflecting the scale of tourism facilities
		Expansion intensity index (x₅, +)	0.061	Reflecting the expansion intensity of tourism lands at different stages
	Tourism income	Tourism income from tickets (x₆, +)	0.156	Reflecting the level of funds available for environmental protection in the protected area
	Tourism income	Total tourism incomes except ticket (x₇, +)	0.230	Reflecting the economic benefit of locals for tourism industry
Environment E(y)	Pressure	Air pollution index (y₁, -)	0.054	Reflecting the pollution pressure from harmful gas emissions
	Pressure	Water pollution index (y₂, -)	0.168	Reflecting the pollution pressure from water pollutants discharge
	State	Infrastructure fragmentation index (y₃, -)	0.109	Reflecting the fragmented degree of ecosystem at a certain period of time
		Shannon-Wiener index (y₄, +)	0.110	Reflecting the landscape diversity degree of ecosystem at a certain period of time
		Contagion (y₅, +)	0.092	Reflecting the stability degree of ecosystem at a certain period of time
		Aggregation index (y₆, +)	0.148	Reflecting the primitive and nature degree of ecosystem at a certain period of time
	Response	Natural disasters (y₇, -)	0.184	Reflecting the occurrence of debris flow, flood, collapse, and landslide disasters
	Response	Area of lake shrinkage (y₈, -)	0.136	Reflecting the interference degree of the lakes

Class	Subclass	Coupling coordination degree (D)
Balanced development	Superiorly balanced development	0.8<D≤1
Balanced development	Favorably balanced development	0.6<D≤0.8
Transitional development	Barely balanced development	0.5<D≤0.6
Transitional development	Slightly unbalanced development	0.4<D≤0.5
Unbalanced development	Moderately unbalanced development	0.2<D≤0.4
Unbalanced development	Seriously unbalanced development	0<D≤0.2

Year	Date	Path/Row	Sensor	Cloud cover (%)
1990	-	45/40	Landsat Global Synthesis data	-
2003	2003-08-10	142/29	Landsat 5 TM	0.01
2003	2003-08-10	142/30	Landsat 5 TM	0.37
2009	2009-08-18	142/29	Landsat 7 ETN + SLC-off	8.44
2009	2009-08-18	142/30	Landsat 7 ETN + SLC-off	13.57
2013	2013-07-04	142/29	Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS	1.07
2013	2013-07-04	142/30	Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS	6.29
2018	2018-09-04	142/29	Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS	1.34
2018	2018-09-04	142/30	Landsat 8 OLI/TIRS	3.51

Data	Data sources
Xinjiang administrative map, Bogda boundary, traffic and river system vector data	Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Bureau of Surveying and Mapping of Geographic Information
Tourist data, tourism income, tourism attractions, added or demolished construction area of Tianchi	Xinjiang Cultural Tourism Bureau
Air condition and water quality	Changji Environmental Protection Department
Digital elevation data (DEM)	Geospatial Data Cloud
China land use/land cover data	Resource and Environment Data Cloud Platform
Historic remote sensing maps	Google Earth

Phases	Area of tourism construction lands
Phases	Core area (m²)	Ratio (%)	Buffer zone (m²)	Ratio (%)
1990	289,888	75.61	93,512	24.39
2003	363,496	14.80	2,092,631	85.20
2009	59,907	3.53	1,636,593	96.47
2013	38,381	3.36	1,104,619	96.64
2018	61,876	3.17	1,891,124	96.83