The Tourism Carrying Capacity Of Shilin Scenic Spot And The Diversion Of Tourists During Peak Periods

In China,with the rapid development of tourism,tourist population has had a straight-line growth,and meanwhile,tourists have concentrated in some particular periods and places in terms of the space-time distraction.Especially,almost all well-known scenic areas are overcrowded across the country during the National Day,Spring Festival and other minor vocations.It not only causes serious threats to the resource and environment,but also poses new challenges to the tourism carrying capacity of tourist resorts.The Stone Forest scenic area as a popular scenic in Yunnan,even in China,attracts numerous visitors.And the annual visitor volume of the Stone Forest has repeatedly hit new peaks.Along with vigorous growth,the Stone Forest is also facing the problem of overcrowded tourism,enormous tourism environmental pressure and uneven development.To counter the problem above,this paper focus on two key points,i.e.tourism carrying capacity and tourist diversion at peak hours,to research the maximum tourist volume index and tourist management strategies,to discuss the relationship between the number of tourist and environment protection,and to explore the sustainable development of scenic area.According to the tourism carrying capacity system,quantitative theory and the current situation of the Stone Forest scenic area,it is calculated that the resource space carrying capacity of the whole sightseeing area of the Stone Forest is 59,114 people,its facility carrying capacity is 24,584 people and its tourist mental carrying capacity is 24,178 people.After assigning different weights to above figures,the maximum tourism carrying capacity of the Stone Forest is calculated to be 52.2 thousand people.Since 98%of the tourists are mainly concentrated in the Major and Minor Stone Forest areas,the maximum tourism carrying capacity of these two main subareas is also evaluated;it is about 32.7 thousand people.To further probe into the reasons of peak hour crowding in the Stone Forest scenic area,the spatial distribution of the tour roads and the space-time distribution of tourists have been studied.The spatial distribution of the tour roads has following characteristics:(1)the overall tour route of the whole area is a closed loop;(2)controlled by vertical joints,the tour roads in the Major and Minor stone forests are mostly oriented in NW and NE directions;(3)the tour roads are densely distributed in the central part of the Major Stone Forest,and gradually become sparse outward.In addition,in terms of tourist distribution in different periods,the annual International Labor Day,the National Day and the Spring Festival are the tourism peak periods,and each day,8:30-11:00 and 14:30-16:30 are the peak hours;As for special distribution,in different places the density of tourists is obviously different,the northeast of the Major Stone Forest and the Minor Stone Forest are the areas with highest density,and in contrast,other areas have much fewer tourists.Based on the analysis of the current situation,and comparing the present tour routes and the preference of the tourists of different age groups,an effort has been made to improve the existing tour routes used by the travel agencies,and four alternative tour routes suitable for different age groups have been optimized so as to divert and disperse tourists.Moreover,from the viewpoint of expanding the tourism space,controlling the number of tourist and avoiding crowding,some concrete and practicable countermeasures have been put forward such as enlarge and develop new sightseeing areas,construct network information platform,develop overlooked sceneries and implement regional management responsibility system,and so on.