Trends in the spatial and temporal evolution of the level of urban ecotourism development in the Yangtze river economic belt

Urban ecotourism is an effective way to promote ecological construction and sustainable tourism development in urban areas against the backdrop of environmental crisis concerns.

The paper took 110 cities at district level along the Yangtze River economic belt for the investigation region, and adopts the methodology of entrepot weight TOPSIS, kernel density estimation, spatio-temporal Markov chain, etc., so as to explore the space-time evolving pattern of the city’s ecotourism level of development in the period of 2011-2022 and to forecast its further trend.

The research discovered that: 1) Spatial and temporal distribution characteristics, the overall ecotourism development level of cities in the Yangtze River economic belt showed a “bimodal” distribution of yearly improvement, but was still in the initial stage, with a greater potential for optimization. Spatially, the development of urban ecotourism in Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing and other provincial administrative units as the center to the neighboring cities by decreasing, revealing a distinctive spatial structure of the circle. 2) On the law of space-time onward transfer, the ecotourism degree of growth of cities in the Yangtze River economic belt showed a transfer trend toward a high-level state, but the mobility of its transfer was poor, and it was difficult to realize a leaping upward transfer in the short term. The background of geographic area profoundly influences the transfer of ecotourism development level across cities of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, with obvious spatial spilling over effects. 3) With regard to the evolutionary trend over time, a large number of cities at the level of the Yangtze River economic belt would continue to move upward toward the higher level of the target steadily, showing the evolution trend of increasing from low to high, at which time the “club convergence” effect will no longer exist.

The development potential of urban ecotourism in the Yangtze River economic belt is large, and its development should be based on environmental protection and governance and rational utilization of resources, while adhering to the principle of macro-integrity, and exploring effective ecotourism development modes.