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

Abstract

Protected areas have a double mandate of both "protection" and "use." Naturebased 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.Keywords: tourism-environment interaction; mountain world natural heritage site; land use and land cover; coupling coordination of tourism-environment

Environmental Management System for Nature Reserves Integrating Virtual Simulation Technology

“…Moreover, tourism is also an effective tool for environmental protection. He discussed the evolution process of the interaction between tourism and environment in the reserve, and pointed out that the improvement has promoted the change of landscape diversity and natural degree in the reserve [4]. The above research topic has studied environmental management from multiple directions, which has certain reference value for the research work of this topic.…”