Automatic site selection of sight-seeing route in ecotourism destinations based on landscape perception sensitivity

Sight-seeing route is an interactive interface between tourists and ecotourism environments.How to design tourist routes perperly and reduce the interference to the environment is an important issue to be resolved in ecological tourism plannings.Although public attitudes towards landscapes are shaped by many different factors,such as age,sex,social and economic status etc.,there are also some common preferences to landscape types,especially for people with similar education background or environmental value orientations.Ecotourists are just such groups.This paper introduced the visible perception affected by landscape visibility,the best viewing distance and the best viewing orientation,and the ecological perception affected by the landscape types and the resource value into the landscape perception sensitivity model,and built a synthesis-weight computation model of ecotourism destination sight-seeing routes selection with the combination of topographic factors such as slope and relief degree of land surface(RDLS).The main steps are as follows.Firstly,the authors calculated the landscape perception degree of each landscape,then added the results together and divided the results into ten levels from high to low using the reclassification tools of ArcGIS,assigned 1—10 to each level;Secondly,calculated the slope and RDLS using terrain analysis tool of ArcGIS platform,and also divided the results into ten levels from low to high using the reclassification tools of ArcGIS,assigned 1—10 to each level;Thirdly,built the suitability computation function of sight-seeing route selection in ecotourism destinations,and calculated the weight results combined with landscape perception degree and terrain factors,then selected the best sight-seeing route using the optimal path analysis of ArcGIS platform;Finally,revised the sight-seeing route acquired automatically with field trips,expert opinion and other factors,so as to the characteristics of scenic landscape to be shown better,and the route is more realistic.This method is tested in the case of Qixiagu scenic region,Wu′an National Geopark in Handan,Hebei Province.Based on Digital Elevation Model(DEM) and high-resolution satellite images,the authors first built the virtual 3D landscape in the ecotourism destination,and then the best scenic sight-seeing route of Qixiagu scenic region was selected automatically based on the virtual geographical environment structured by ArcGIS platform.Finally the sight-seeing route was revised by field trips and other correction factors.Thus a sight-seeing route was determined in easy way where tourists can have better perception.This method can supply us a relatively reasonable sight-seeing route quickly in scenic spot planning period.The synthesis-weight computation model of ecotourism destination sight-seeing route selection provides a quantitative analysis method for the plannings of ecotourism and landscape designs in micro-scale.This method can be also applied to the evaluation the existing sight-seeing route in scenic spot.So it can provide more ideas and references for the management and ecology protection of scenic spots.