Assessing rural landscape using landscape character assessment to promote tourism in Yayou Gou Village, Shandong Province, China

The rural landscape is essentially fundamental for rural tourism development, acting as an efficient path to rural revitalization in China. Various rural landscape changes including landscape degradation in regional variety and sensual experience, traditional landscape qualities loss, pattern changes and village hollowing have caused the distinctive and original characteristics losses in the past few decades around the world. However, studies on landscape character at the local level, particularly focusing on villages, are insufficient, and the comprehensive exploration of landscape character factors that influence tourism development is still lacking. Moreover, the Strategic Plan for Rural Revitalization in China and policies aimed at encouraging rural development and promoting villages as tourist attractions at Shandong provincial territory lack study on assessment and conservation of rural landscape characteristics, leaving a gap between studies, policies and practical implementation of landscape character extraction, conservation and utilization towards tourism. To address these deficiencies, this study aims to conserve the unique rural landscape in Shandong Province, China amidst modernization activities by identifying the characteristics and proposing a framework to strengthen these characteristics for rural tourism development. Four objectives were proposed to achieve the research aim: firstly, to investigate the main characters of the rural landscape that affect tourism development; secondly, to identity the fundamental factors of rural landscape character for conservation; thirdly, to analyze the effects of modernization on rural landscape and tourism development; and finally, to develop a framework for conserving and strengthening rural landscape characteristics in promoting rural tourism development. The adopted methodology is a case study of Yayou Gou Village, following qualitative methods that includes a document technique, landscape surveys, observations interviews with villagers, village management members, tourists and professionals, under the frame of Landscape Character Assessment. The data was analyzed by GIS overlay analysis for the first objective and qualitative content analysis for the others. To address the objectives, this study firstly identified, described and mapped nine landscape character types: waterscape character, traditional building and new building character, educational landscape, vacant land, leisure and sport landscape, entrance landscape character, pine forest landscape and chestnut forest landscape character, providing spatial references for the conservation framework. Secondly, the fundamental factors of rural landscape character for conservation were identified, including the main factors of cultural and social landscape, natural landscape, perceptual landscape, seasonal landscape and facility and infrastructure, along with their secondary factors. Thirdly, the effects of modernization on local history and culture, traditional and natural landscape, new buildings, vernacular buildings and village infrastructure were disclosed. Lastly, guidelines to conserve and utilize landscape character were proposed and a framework for conserving and strengthening rural landscape characteristics in promoting rural tourism development was developed based on the key findings. The framework combing the key findings has achieved the research objectives. The findings extend the scope of landscape character assessment and synthesize the content of rural landscape characteristics for conservation and utilization in promoting rural tourism development, thus establishing a bridge between unique rural landscape characteristics and rural tourism enhancement. Furthermore, this study provides a reference for villages to conserve and utilize the landscape characteristics, thereby laying the foundation for the rural tourism development as an A rating for the quality of China’s tourist attractions and the formulation of practical policies by rural landscape related bodies.

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