Festival Tourism Environmental Impact Study

Tourism environment is the basement of tourism activities and facilities,whose quality directly decides experience of tourists,and affect the sustainable development of tourism. The importance of tourism has been endorsed unanimously by tourism industry and academics,and environmental impact study of tourism has become one of the important research content of tourism academics.But as an emerging tourism type,environmental imapct study of festival tourism is neglected,and theoretical research lags behind the development of the practice.It seriously hampers the sustainable development of festival tourism.Therefore,strengthening environmental impact study of festival tourism is very necessary to promoting the development of festival tourism.This paper takes Shanghai Taohua Festival ,Shanghai Urban Forest Cainival as an example.On the base of investigating and analyzing changes of ecological environmental factors impacted by festival tourism, such as vegetations, soils,water, atmosphere,this paper exlpored environmental impact of festival tourism,and put forwards strategies on environmental control and management.The major conclusions are as the following:(1)In the vegetation environment, the samples of activity areas has the worst quality, followed by buffer zones, and the background.In the Peach Gardern,festivals mainly affect the herbaceous vegetation and vegetation landscapes.After Taohua Festival,the species(S), cover(C), information index of species diversity(H), evenness (Jsw) in the the samples of activity areas and buffer zones decreased,and the background′s increased. And tourism impcat index(TII) in the activity areas almost increased 0.2-0.3.With Two-Way Indicators Species Analysis(TWINSPAN),it shows that the vegetation environment was impacted by tourists damaging branches and discardting rubbish.Through this, the samples were divided into three groups which reflect the extent of impact by tourism activities.The first group was affected most seriously,including Recreation Park,Leisure Restaurant,Bridge,Peach Watching 1;the second group follows,including Peach Watching2,the least is the third group including Background 1,Background 2,Stage,Peach Watching 3.In the Gongqing Forest Park,the height of vegetation is more sensitive than species,cover and biomass.With the increasement of distance from the trails and the cumulative effect of trampling(number of days),all indicators decreased after festival. There is a close relationship between indicators and vegetation types,and there is a nonlinear relationship between relative vegetation cover,relative height, relative number of species, relative biomass and trampling intensity,with a quadratic regression can better fit this relationship.(2)In soil environment,after festival,the soil bulk density,organics,available nitrogen have shown changes in the law,but PH, available P(except Peach Gardern), available K haven′t.The spatial heterogeneity of soil emergied a trend of homogenization.In the Peach Gardern,though PCA ordination,it shows that of all soil parameters, the soil bulk density,organics,available nitrogen are the major changing indicators,and Bridge,Stage,Peach Watching 1 in activity area were most seriously affected,Peach Watching 2 and Peach Watching 3 in the buffer zone followed,the backgrounds were the least. In the Gongqing Forest Park,after festival the distribution of samples and vegetation changed largely,and the distance from the trail is the key factor.(3)In the water environment, in the aspect of time changing,because of serious impact by tourists after Taohua Festival,the water quality was deteriorated largely in Farm Restaurant;in the other samples ,the water quality was improved because of the eco-facilities and the less participation of tourists;and in the space distribution,the water quality shows a characteristic of three-group distribution.The first group (including Farm Restaurant ,Background 2 and Fishing Zone) was more seriously polluted by organics,the organic pollutions and TN content were increased in the second group(including Background 1) ,and the third group (including Barbecue Area,Shipping Area,the Creek Around Lake and the Pond of Watching Fish) shows increasment of TN content and decreasment of TP content.(4)In the atmosphere,anion concentration in Peach Gardern was low,and the quality of air was poor,which is related to environmental features ,but not the number of tourists.But there was a negative correlation between instaneous aeroanion concentration and the number of tourists.(5)In the perception of impact on the environment in Gongqing Forest Park,the tourists can understand rationally the environmental impact of festival tourism,and the tourists thought herbaceous vegetation,wild animals,water were affected more seriously;the tourists showed a"festival-type"characteristics,preferences lively festival scene.