Study On Spatial Pattern And The Evaluation Of Tourism Development Potential Of Traditional Villages In Hunan Province

Traditional villages have high value of history,culture,science,art,society and economy.However,with the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization in recent decades,traditional villages have been fading away or even dying out and this phenomenon is more serious.So the protection and development of traditional villages should be done right way.The current issue has attracted great attention of relevant departments.A large number of traditional villages are extensively distributed in Hunan Province with abundant resources and distinctive characteristics,but there are few researches on the spatial pattern of Chinese traditional villages of five previous batches in Hunan Province.Hunan,as a major tourism province,has plenty of tourism resources.It also attaches great importance to the development of tourism and has developed many tourism attractions.The tourism has achieved many distinguished achievements,but there are still some tourism resources to be tapped in Hunan Province.At present,rural tourism is booming in China.Traditional villages,as a special form of countryside,have considerable prospects in tourism development.Additionally,it is urgent to study the driving factors about tourism development and tourism development potential of traditional villages in Hunan Province.Taking Hunan Province as the research area,658 Chinese traditional villages as the research object and based on GIS technical means,this paper explored the spatial pattern of traditional villages in Hunan Province with the help of spatial analysis and quantitative geography methods such as the nearest neighbor index(NNI),coefficient of variation(CV),geographic concentration index(GCI),Gini coefficient,unbalanced index(UI),grid dimension,kernel density estimation(KDE)and spatial autocorrelation(Moran’s I).This paper studied the factors driving the tourism development of traditional villages in Hunan Province,and built tourism development potential index(TDPI)model of traditional villages by applying entropy method.Based on this model,the tourism development potential of traditional villages in Hunan Province was evaluated.Finally,some suggestions were put forward for the protection and tourism development of traditional villages in the province.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Traditional villages of Hunan Province present a gathering distribution in space and the spatial distribution is uneven.The regional difference of spatial distribution of the traditional villages is very obvious.On the regional scale,the traditional villages are mainly distributed in western Hunan and southern Hunan.On the city scale,they are mainly concentrated in five cities,namely Xiangxi,Huaihua,Chengzhou,Yongzhou and Shaoyang.On the scale of districts and counties,they are distributed in 75 counties in the province,the number of traditional villages is not less than 20 in 11 counties.The traditional villages have obvious fractal characteristics and the fractal structure is rather complex.In other words,the traditional villages show the characteristics of multi-center clustering in the process of self-organization evolution.The high-density agglomeration areas of the traditional villages are distributed in the following three areas: Wuling Mountain area,Xuefeng Mountain area and the mountainous area of southern Hunan.And the trend of the distribution belts is generally consistent with that of the mountains.The spatial distribution of traditional villages in Hunan Province shows obvious positive spatial autocorrelation.Both the areas with more and less traditional villages tend to gather in space.(2)The tourism development of traditional villages in Hunan Province is comprehensively influenced by physical geography and human geography.Some internal factors that affect the tourism development of traditional villages are topographic features,river system,vegetation coverage,mean annual precipitation,mean annual temperature,etc.And social economy,population density,tourist market,traffic location,high-level scenic spots and so on are important power of extrapolation.All of these have a significant impact on the tourism development of traditional villages.Based on the above research results,study on the evaluation of tourism development potential about traditional villages in Hunan Province was conducted in the paper.It was found that traditional villages in Hunan Province are rich in tourism resources and the development potential of them is great.The areas of high-level tourism development potential of traditional villages are widely distributed,and there are obviously highlevel tourism development potential areas in 79 counties of Hunan Province.The second-level potential areas are located in the periphery of the first-level potential areas.The first-level tourism development potential areas of traditional villages are mainly distributed in 45 counties,accounting for more than one-third of areas in the province.The first-level potential areas are mainly located in the western Hunan,southern Hunan and central Hunan,with an obvious spatial distribution characteristic of “along the river” and “along the road”.(3)In order to protect and develop traditional villages,according to related research results,this paper proposed some suggestions,such as investigating resources of villages and compiling protection planning of traditional villages;applying new technologies to accomplish management and publicity work;adhering to reasonable and moderate development of traditional villages;actively building growth poles of Hunan Province and achieving multi-dimensional development of points,lines and surfaces;reserving the talents with respect to protection and development of traditional villages and so on.