Research On Multi-group Perception Landscape Changes In Western Ethnic Tourism Community

Over the past 20 years, the research of landscape change has attracted the extensive attention of the international geography world. Various researches mainly analyze the landscape change and its effect through remote sensing image analysis, and the researches focus on wetland, urban edge and rural communities. They have provided important support for mankind to deal with ecological environment problem. However, there are obvious deficiencies in the existing researches of landscape change, because they ignore the social impact of landscape changes. In fact, with the change of the physical landscape, the corresponding social and cultural landscape as well as human social psychology and behaviors also change. To understand the social effects of the landscape change is an important way to solve the social problems in regional landscape change. Along with the tourism development, the western minority tourism communities are rapidly changing. With such change, the social and cultural landscape of communities also changes accordingly, and the social psychology and behaviors of communities are affected. Through the landscape change perceived by community residents, people can get to know the effect. In addition, to compare the landscape change perceived by community residents and the objective landscape change, people can describe the social effect of the landscape change.Langmusi is chosen by this paper as the study area, through the participatory mapping and semi-structure interview to analyze the three types of people:Tibetans, Muslims and outside operators. After using the stratified sampling method, we get 262 effective questionnaires. Through the qualitative analysis method to extract the interviewees on community landscape change of perception, finally we get 285 perceived points of the landscape change direction and 310 perceived points of the landscape change process. In the end, by means of GIS spatial analysis method to produce the spatial characteristics of landscape change, corresponded with the perception of landscape changes and land use change in the same period, we recognized the link between physical landscape changes and perceptive landscape changes. It is expected that the research can enrich the research contents of landscape change, provide a new technical platform for community participation, and offer new way of thinking for community tourism planning theory innovation and the healthy development of rural tourism. Through the research, conclusions are drawn as follows:From the spatial analysis of landscape change direction perception, overall, positive change is far greater than the negative change. Positive change focuses mainly on the central street, the Hui village and Saichi Temple in the Langmusi. According to the internal comparison about the people, for the outside operators, the positive change degree is close to the negative change degree, with the former being greater, while for the Tibetan and the Hui people, the positive change degree is far greater than the negative change degree. Besides, the scope of the positive change is mainly concentrated on the core region of the town, despite of some differences among the group. Anyway, for the tourism development, there is more good than harm.From the spatial analysis of landscape change process perception, housing environmental improvement, road condition improvement and rapid development of tourism have the greatest perception degree. After the tourism development, living conditions of the local residents have been greatly improved, while the housing of the core area in the town, the Hui village and Tibetan villages have changed dramatically in their appearances, which further proves that tourism development could benefit the people’s livelihood. However, the negative perception degree of feature loss is also greater, which is mainly reflected in destruction of buildings at the two sides of the street, as well as some traditional architecture. These phenomena shall arouse people’s attention during the tourism development, while both development and protection shall be considered.From the comparative analysis of landscape change process perception of different groups, there are perception differences among their scopes of influence during tourism development. Due to different relevant interests, different groups have their own understanding about the perception of the surrounding landscape change, while the difference if the perception scope relating to each theme is also obvious among the three groups.From the comparative analysis of land use change and landscape change perception, corresponding relation of the two variables, namely land use change and landscape change perception is no difference among the three groups. Basically, among the seven perception changes, a large number, or all of the changes are in accordance with the land for commercial use transformed from the residential land in the land use change, despite of the small differences. Overall, influence of tourism development is in high correlation with the land for commercial use type transformed from the residential land. It shows the interactive development between the tourism and business of Langmusi, which can supplement each other.