Comprehensive evaluation and prediction of tourism ecological security in droughty area national parks-a case study of Qilian Mountain of Zhangye section, China.

Abstract

Tourism activities have brought overexploitation of natural ecotourism resources and ecological pressure challenge though it exactly contributes to the economic prosperity of a region. Research on tourism ecological safety is of great importance for tourist destinations to balance the relationship between environmental protection and tourism development. Qilian Mountains National Park (QMNP) has a prominent ecological status and is a vital ecological barrier in the northwest of China, which attracts large numbers of tourists every year for its rich tourism resources in the Zhangye (ZY) region. However, there is still a lack of systematic research on the environmental impact of tourism activities and on achieving sustainable development of ecotourism in national parks. We took QMNP-ZY as the study object, establishing the system of indicators based on the PSR model for the comprehensive evaluation of tourism ecological safety and the diagnosis of the main obstacles. Moreover, the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was introduced to forecast the evolutionary trends of tourism ecological security in QMNP-ZY. The results showed that (1) The tourism ecological security composite values of the QMNP-ZY exhibited a "U"-type evolution of "first fall-then rise" feature, and the pressure layer gradually became the dominant factor. (2) For the main barrier factors, there had been a shift from response factors. (3)The output of the ARIMA model demonstrated that the level of tourism ecological security would rise in a short period and then decline a few years later. Especially, the contribution degree of economic to the tourism eco-security development will weaken with the region's economy growing.