A Study Of Impacts Of Tourism Development On Landscape And Anduo Tibetan Culture At The Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve

In the recent years, the impacts of tourism development on destinations have become one of the hot topics in studies of the world tourism. Work on the landscape fragmentation and ethnic cultures of the Jiuzhaigou nature reserve render us the knowledge of the degree and range of the impact of tourism development on the landscape and culture of local people, which provides the related government with the theoretical reference on how to preserve the landscape and cultural diversity of Jiuzhaigou nature reserve and of other tourist destinations so as to ensure the sustainable development of tourism.In this study, the quantitive and qualitative analyses of the impacts of tourism development on the landscape and cultural diversity of the Jiuzhaigou nature reserve were conducted by means of landscape ecological, tourism and statistical methods, using GIS and SPSS software, on the basis of the Jiuzhaigou GIS maps of decoded satellite images and data derived from questionnaires.We mainly adopted the following two methods for analysing impacts of tourism development on landscape. First, the changes in the degree of landscape fragmentation before and after the construction of tourism corridor were determined through landscape ecological methods, with the Jiuzhaigou GIS mapsof decoded satellite images as basic data. Second, questionnaires for the tourists and residents in Jiuzhaigou, the questionnaires were involved in the influences of tourism on Jiuzhaigou landscape as well as the induced changes in waters. The SPSS software was used to analyze the subjective evaluation made by the tourists and residents. As for the influences of tourism development on the Jiuzhaigou ethnic cultural diversity, the statistical technique was mainly employed to make a full analysis. The questionnaire to the local residents covers seven aspects, including their housing styles, spoken and written languages, religious faith, diet, dressing and incomes, etc. It aims to survey the status quo of cultural diversity of the local Anduo Tibetan, the changes of cultural diversity as well as the local residents' attitudes towards those changes. The questionnaires to the domestic tourists is their perceptions of the cultural diversity, such as "how do you feel the folkways of the minority nationalities in Jiuzhaigou", "during your tour in Jiuzhaigou, can you have a strong sense of the minority features", and "do you think whether the tourism development will impact these minority features or not". These questions are designed to find out tourists' impressions of the status quo of the cultural diversity. The results of analyzing the data statistically suggest that changes have taken place in the local Anduo Tibetan's housing style, spoken and written languages, diet, dressing and religious faith, etc..The results of our study suggest that the Jiuzhaigou nature reserve have seven types of natural landscape patches, including needle-leaved forest, broad-leaved forest, needle-leaved forest and broad-leaved forest mixed forest, shrub, meadow, bare gravel ground as well as water body. The matrixes of the landscape are shrub and needle-leaved forest, so we must pay more attention on protecting these two patches during the tourism construction. The mean density of tourism corridor in the Jiuzhaigou nature reserve is 0.199km/km2, it shows that the mean density of tourism corridor is low. The mean patch densities before and after corridor construction are 17.172个/km2 andl7.756个/km2, respectively, and the mean landscape patch fragmentation index increased from 0.015426 to 0.015979 afterthe construction of corridors, these indexes suggest the constructions of tourism corridor extend the degree of landscape fragmentation at Jiuzhaigou nature reserve. As the researches of the cultural diversity indicated, the change percentages of the spoken Tibetan, diet, dressing and religious faith are, respectively, 79.4%, 84.5%, 78.4% and 39.2%, the results suggest that tourism development have influenced the local Anduo Tibetan culture at Jiuzhaigou nature reserve.With respect to the protection of Jiuzhaigou nature reserve, the paper suggests that the tourism projects be developed according to the principle of ecology priority, implementing the key protection of matrix, to build habitat corridor, to control the number of tourists and the enhancement of studies on the Jiuzhaigou nature reserve landscape fragmentation. For protecting culture diversity resource of Jiuzhaigou, it is recommended that we protect the living circumstance of the culture of the local Anduo Tibetan, emphasize on resident involved in tourism, and establish folklore sections thus realizing the tourist sustainable development.