Identifying the spatiotemporal dynamics of forest ecotourism values with remotely sensed images and social media data: A perspective of public preferences

Ecotourism, as a cultural ecosystem service, is an essential part of rural economic growth. Developing feasible methods and indicators for ecotourism values is vital to exploring the interactions between public preferences and ecosystems, thus providing information for sustainable ecosystem management. However, forest ecotourism value assessments at the regional scale still lack scientific frameworks covering the spatiotemporal dimension. Here, we proposed a framework to assess forest ecotourism values and explore the contributions of public preferences, selecting a typical and abundant forest area, Lin'an County, China. First, we applied a text mining approach on social comments to identify key variables related to public preferences. Then, we mapped these variables with remote sensing and GIS data and incorporated them with a Maxent model. This model revealed the spatiotemporal patterns of forest ecotourism value and its interaction with public preferences, over two periods, i.e., 2010-2014 and 2015-2019. Our results showed that albeit with a minor change magnitude in the entirety of ecotourism values (1-3% overall decrease), about 34% and 44% of forests were observed as significant increases and decreases in ecotourism values, respectively. A large number of increases were concentrated in the village scenic areas, while decreases were observed in planted areas. Such notable changes were mainly attributable to changes in accessibility variables with 67% of contributions in 2010-2014 and 72% in 2015-2019. Variables related to human perception and vision (forest attribute and color diversity) also played a part. Our findings infer that local rural-building policies have an evident influence on the distribution and intensity of forest ecotourism. Our proposed framework provides references for evaluating the response and effectiveness of local policies and to make proactive efforts for forest protection, restoration and management.

Automated summary

Ecotourism, as a cultural ecosystem service, is crucial for rural economic growth. However, there is a lack of scientific frameworks for assessing forest ecotourism values at the regional scale. This study proposes a framework to evaluate forest ecotourism values and explores the influence of public preferences. The results reveal significant spatiotemporal changes in forest ecotourism values, mainly influenced by accessibility variables.