Spatio-temporal characteristics of traditional village landscape pattern and its influencing factors from the perspective of tourism development: a case study of Huangcheng Village, China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tourism development promotes economic income and cultural protection of traditional villages, but it also disturbs their landscape pattern and ecosystem. This study is aim to explore the process characteristics and mechanisms of the impact of tourism development on the landscape pattern of traditional villages. Taking Huangcheng Village, a typical tourism-oriented traditional village as a case, this research selects four remote sensing images from 1995 to 2020 according to its key time nodes of tourism development, analyzes its landscape expansion and pattern change, and uses Geodetector to explore influencing factors. The results show that: (1) The landscape change mainly presents the non-natural landscape continuously occupying the natural landscape, and expands continuously around tourist resources in edge-expansion and leapfrog-expansion manner, among which the expansion from 2003 to 2011 is the most significant; (2) The dominance and connectivity of non-natural landscape are enhanced, and the overall landscape pattern experiences a “relatively complete – tending to fragmentation – tending to completeness” change process; (3) The dominant factors affecting landscape pattern have stage characteristics. The results emphasize the role of tourism-related socio-economic and policy factors in influencing landscape pattern, which is significant for the landscape pattern optimization and sustainable development of tourist-type traditional villages.