Research On Spatio-Temporal Behavior And Landscape Preference Of Domestic Hikers In Northwest Yunnan Based On VGI Data

Hiking tourism is in full swing against the backdrop of increasingly individualized tourist demand and vigorous development of ecotourism,and a timely understanding of the spatio-temporal behavior and landscape preferences of hiking tourists in largescale space can provide reference for policy formulation,planning,and management of regional hiking tourism development.However,there is a discrepancy between traditional tourism activities and hiking tourism in terms of size,duration,and manner of travel.Traditional research techniques,including questionnaire surveys and on-site observations,take a long time to complete and demand a lot of labors and resources.But more importantly,it is very challenging to track hiking visitors.The popularity of VGI(Volunteered Geographic Information)data in the Internet era has led to changes in the way tourists organize and travel,providing an opportunity for hiking research to shift to solving the problems of difficult access to hiking information and strong subjective interference with information.Located at the junction of the Asia-European plate and the Pacific plate,Northwest Yunnan forms a diverse vertical climate and three-dimensional ecological environment,giving birth to unique tourism resources.Northwest Yunnan is now renowned both in China and outside as a paradise for hikers.Therefore,this study takes Northwest Yunnan as the study area,analyzes the basic characteristics,spatial and temporal behaviors,and landscape preferences of domestic hikers by crawling VGI data of hiking tourism on 2bulu platforms and using a combination of spatial analysis,statistical analysis and content analysis,and comes to the following significant research conclusions:(1)The majority of hikers in northwest Yunnan are male,and their levels of experience tend to be beginning and intermediate.(2)The source of hikers is more scattered,showing a distribution pattern of more in the southeast and less in the northwest.The dividing line between dense and sparse areas has a certain degree of similarity with the Hu Huanyong Line,and the distribution of sources is related to the economic development of the sources,while following the law of distance decay.(3)In northwest Yunnan,hikers’ visits are more obviously seasonal,concentrating in late spring and early summer,and their intra-day behavior patterns can be categorized into three types: early birds,nightingales,and antelopes.(4)The hottest hiking routes in northwest Yunnan include 10 routes such as Meili pilgrimage route around Yubeng Village,Meili North Slope Small Circle Trail,Tiger Leaping Gorge Hiking Route(The Upper Gorge),and Haba Snow Mountain Hiking Route.Hiking tourism in Northwest Yunnan can be divided into 8 major hiking areas like Meili Wonderland Hiking Area,Erhai Pastoral Hiking Area,Yulong Snowfield Hiking Area,etc.(5)Hiking tourists in northwest Yunnan obviously prefer natural landscapes,and botanical,meteorological,and geomorphological landscapes are the three most popular types of scenery among hikers.