Xiuping Yang’s research while affiliated with Lanzhou University of Technology and other places

This paper constructs an evaluation system of tourism development quality (TDQ) that can reflect the new development concept from five dimensions: tourism product quality, tourism service quality, tourism economic quality, tourism social quality, and tourism environment quality. The comprehensive evaluation model of the improved “vertical and horizontal” open-level method is used to measure the TDQ in 31 provinces in China from 2005 to 2019. Combined with the model of Markov chain and hot-spot analysis, the temporal and spatial evolution characteristics are analyzed. The major findings are as follows: (1) China’s TDQ tended to improve and showed a decreasing trend of “east–central–west” from 2005 to 2019. (2) Spatial factors have a certain impact on the transfer of different levels of TDQ. Moreover, a certain phenomenon of “club convergence” exists. (3) The hot spots of TDQ expanded, and the cold spots contracted, indicating increased high-level agglomeration and weakened low-level agglomeration from 2005 to 2019.

While increased tourist demand has brought economic benefits to tourist destinations, it has also put tremendous pressure on tourism-related ecological environments. Therefore, the relationship between regional urban tourism’s economic benefits and tourism ecologies must be considered by increasing the ecological security levels of regional urban tourism and promoting sustainable tourism development. This paper defines the ecological security of regional urban tourism, constructs an indicator system of said ecological security based on a pressure-state-response social-economic-environment (PSR-SEE) model, uses the entropy method to objectively assign weights to the indicator system, constructs a dynamic multi-scenario simulation model to assess ecological security under continuous, economic priority and various ecological protection scenarios, employs ArcGIS software to analyze the spatial distribution patterns of the ecological security of regional urban tourism, and uses a standard deviation ellipse method to analyze the space–time evolutionary track of the ecological security of regional urban tourism. The index system is applied to 16 cities in Hubei Province to measure the ecological security levels and test the viability of the system. The present research focuses on the space–time evolution of the ecological security of regional urban tourism, addresses the contradictions between socioeconomic development and the ecological security of regional urban tourism, provides an important reference for tourism destination planning, and can assist in improving the levels of the ecological security of regional urban tourism to promote sustainable tourism development.

The rapid development of the urban economy in China and the accompanying income growth experienced by urban residents have increased demand for tourism and leisure, which has brought pressure on the urban tourism environment system (UTES), making the contradiction between tourism economic development and the ecological environment increasingly acute. While seeking to rationalize the economic, social, and ecological benefits of tourism, reducing the fragility of the UTES and improving its anti-interference and recovery capabilities have become attracted significant attention from scholars in China and elsewhere. This paper establishes a definition of resilience for an UTES and constructs an evaluation index system for it in terms of the social, economic, and ecological environments. It also establishes an entropy weight-TOPSIS resilience evaluation model to measure resilience in regional systems, using ArcGIS to analyze the standard deviation ellipse and center of the gravity track of the resilience. System dynamics was used to construct diagrams of causal relationships and stock flow for the constituent elements of UTES to show the mechanisms that promote its resilience. This paper investigates 14 cities of Gansu Province in particular to simulate the resilience model of a regional system.

Given the relatively harsh natural environment in semi-arid valley areas, the attraction and radiation functions of semi-arid valley cities have become the foci of further development in Western China. This study takes Lanzhou City (a semi-arid river valley city) as an example and uses the theoretical framework of pressure-state-response to optimize the response strategies of the tourism environmental needs of the City’s core stakeholders from the multi-scenario and time series diversity perspectives. Based on the index system of the tourism environment system (TES) in semi-arid valley cities, the system dynamics model is used to forecast the index system of the tourism environment from multi-scenario perspectives. Based on the evolutionary optimization algorithm NSGA-II, the core stakeholders are optimized to meet the tourism environment needs, and the optimal solution set is selected based on the decision makers’ preferences. Finally, several measures to improve the anti-interference ability of semi-arid valley cities’ TES are proposed, namely standardizing the preferences of decision makers, improving the resilience of the destination TES, carrying out the safety management of valley cities’ TES, and adjusting the seasonality of such cities to improve their tourism environment and promote the welfare of various stakeholders.

The rapid expansion of agricultural areas in semi-arid China over the past decades has aggravated the imbalance of the agroeconomy and agroecological environment. To further understand the coupling relationship between the two, this paper, taking Yulin as a case, develops an integrated index system for evaluation of the agricultural economy and the agroecological environment, and a model of the coupling coordination degree for evaluation of the dynamic coupling relationship between the two. Based on that, we have investigated the coupling coordination by comparing the differences of the development index of the two sub-systems at different periods. Subsequently, we further clarified the internal interaction and coupling relationship between the two sub-systems with a cross-impact analysis. The results suggested that the weights of ecological environmental conditions and agricultural development input are respectively0.5908 and 0.3570. From 1997 to 2016, a high-level interactive coupling existed between the agroecological environment and agricultural economy, and the coupling coordination degree of the two sub-systems grew slowly. Overall, the degradation of the agroecological environment impeded the coordinated development of the agricultural economy and the level of coupling coordination improved from basic coordination in the beginning to superior coordination in the end. The agricultural economy grew rapidly, at the expense of the degradation of the agroecological environment. Furthermore, more attention should be paid to improving agricultural development input for promoting economic and ecological benefits, and coupling coordination degree of the two sub-systems. These findings are important for boosting sustainable development of the agricultural economy in semi-arid areas.