Tourists' preference for colors of forest landscapes and its implications for forest landscape planning policies

Abstract

Green space helps people improve their physical and psychological health, while the seasonal influence of green space changes the characteristics of forest landscape. This study adopts the attention restoration theory (ART) to assess the psychological benefits for different forest landscape colors in Aowanda National Forest Park, the most known one in Taiwan. The results showed that the attention recovery, landscape preference, and willingness to stay vary with different forest landscape colors. Among them, attention recovery was positively associated with landscape preference, which was further associated with the desired length of stay. Tourists preferred and were willing to stay longer for forest landscapes with red and yellow & red combination (warm tones), showing that relatively low color temperature and high saturation create a warm feeling to tourists. This study recommends that local climate change and environment should be considered in the future environmental planning and landscape design for national forest parks; tree species with leaf colors that change seasonally (e.g., taxodium distichum and liquidambar formosana) should be selected; and the overall color consistency of the landscape should be concerned to improve the effect of restoring the environment. For increasing the attention restoration experience, planning can be implemented according to the features of various national forest parks.