Abstract
The recreation opportunity spectrum (ROS) has been widely recognized as an effective tool for the inventory and planning of outdoor recreational resources. However, its applications have been primarily focused on forest-dominated settings with few studies being conducted on all land types at a regional scale. The creation of a ROS is based on physical, social, and managerial settings, with the physical setting being measured by three criteria: remoteness, size, and evidence of humans. One challenge to extending the ROS to all land types on a large scale is the difficulty of quantifying the evidence of humans and social settings. Thus, this study, for the first time, developed an innovative approach that used night lights as a proxy for evidence of humans and points of interest (POI) for social settings to generate an automatic ROS for Hunan Province using Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial analysis. The whole province was classified as primitive (2.51%), semi-primitive non-motorized (21.33%), semi-primitive motorized (38.60%), semi-developed natural (30.99%), developed natural (5.61%), and highly developed (0.96%), which was further divided into three subclasses: large-natural (0.63%), small natural (0.27%), and facilities (0.06%). In order to implement the management and utilization of natural recreational resources in Hunan Province at the county (city, district) level, the province’s 122 counties (cities, districts) were categorized into five levels based on the ROS factor dominance calculated at the county and provincial levels. These five levels include key natural recreational counties (cities, districts), general natural recreational counties (cities, districts), rural counties (cities, districts), general metropolitan counties (cities, districts), and key metropolitan counties (cities, districts), with the corresponding numbers being 8, 21, 50, 24, and 19, respectively.
Highlights
The recreation opportunity spectrum (ROS) is a spectrum or continuum defined based on the combination of three elements: activities, settings, and experience opportunities [1]
Hunan Province is featured by ROS classes that are relatively small in size, geographically discontinuous, and physically irregular
According to the ROS results, primitive areas of natural recreational resources in Hunan Province account for 2.51%
Summary
The recreation opportunity spectrum (ROS) is a spectrum or continuum defined based on the combination of three elements: activities, settings, and experience opportunities [1]. People seek to participate in preferred activities in preferred settings (physical, social, and managerial) to achieve a preferred experience. The physical setting has three components (remoteness, size, and evidence of humans) and is defined by the absence/presence of human sights and sounds, size, and amount of environmental modification caused by human activity. The social setting, measured as user density, reflects the frequency and types of association between individuals and groups, indicating opportunities for solitude, or interaction with selected persons or large groups [1]. The managerial setting reflects the number and types of behavior restrictions on people by management 4.0/).
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