Enhancing transboundary natural tourism resources governance:unveiling the spatial pattern and its influencing factors

Tourism resources that span provincial boundaries in China play a pivotal role in regional development,yet effective governance poses persistent challenges.This study addresses this issue by constructing a comprehensive database of transboundary natural tourism resources(TNTR)through amalgamation of diverse data sources.Utilizing the Getis-Ord Gi^(*),kernel density estimation,and geographical detectors,we scrutinize the spatial patterns of TNTR,focusing on both named and unnamed entities,while exploring the influencing factors.Our findings reveal 7883 identified TNTR in China,with mountain tourism resources emerging as the predominant type.Among provinces,Hunan boasts the highest count,while Shanghai exhibits the lowest.Southern China demonstrates a pronounced clustering trend in TNTR distribution,with the spatial arrangement of biological landscapes appearing more random compared to geological and water landscapes.Western China,characterized by intricate terrain,exhibits fewer TNTR,concurrently unveiling a significant presence of unnamed natural tourism resources.Crucially,administrative segmentation influences TNTR development,generating disparities in regional goals,developmental stages and intensities,and management approaches.In response to these variations,we advocate for strengthening the naming of the unnamed transboundary tourism resources,constructing a geographic database of TNTR for government and establishing a collaborative management mechanism based on TNTR database.Our research contributes to elucidating the intricate landscape of TNTR,offering insights for tailored governance strategies in the realm of cross-provincial tourism resource management.

The Spatial Differences and Influencing Factors of Tourism Resources in Ningxia,China

The analysis of the spatial distribution of tourism resources and the identification of its influencing factors are crucial for supporting the sustainable development of regional tourism.This study established a comprehensive database of tourism resources in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region(Ningxia)through a combination of literature review and field research.It examined the quantitative,qualitative,and categorical characteristics of tourism resources in Ningxia,and determined the spatial patterns based on kernel density and spatial association analysis.This study also comprehensively evaluated the societal,economic,and environmental factors influencing the spatial distribution of tourism resources in the entire region by employing the geographical detector model to quantify the influence of each factor.The following results were obtained.(1)There were 29218 individual tourism resources in Ningxia,comprising eight main types,23 subtypes,and 105 fundamental types,and they exhibit a hierarchical pyramidal structure.(2)The tourism resources in Ningxia displayed characteristics of“widespread regional dispersion and limited regional agglomeration”.The spatial distribution of tourism resources was highly imbalanced,and most types of tourism resources exhibit strong positive spatial correlation.(3)The altitude,annual precipitation,population density,distance from urban centers,urbanization rate,and per capita GDP were identified as significant factors influencing the spatial distribution of tourism resources in Ningxia.Based on the results,we recommend that the government should formulate tourism development policies in Ningxia based on local conditions to effectively address the spatial imbalances,enhance the sustainability of tourism development,and continue to promote high-quality tourism development in Ningxia.

Spatial patterns of interprovincial mountain geographical names in China and implications for regional governance

Suffering from fragile environment, poor accessibility and infrastructure, as well as social,political and economic marginality, the interprovincial mountain geographical entities are difficult areas for the regional governance in China.By analyzing the spatial patterns and the influencing factors of the interprovincial mountain geographical names(IMGNs), the goal of this research is to clarify the geographical features of IMGNs and offer alternatives for the management of interprovincial mountain regions in China. The spatial visualization,the analysis of spatial agglomeration and the influencing factors of IMGNs were all implemented under a geographical information system. Results showed that there were 6869 IMGNs in China according to the database of "China's Second National Survey of Geographical Names(2014-2018)",including 4209 mountain geographical names, 1684 mountain peak geographical names and 976 the other mountain geographical names. Hunan Province had the largest number of names while Shanghai had the smallest number of names. In addition, the spatial variance of the mountain peak names and the mountain names were larger than that of the other mountain geographical names, and the IMGNs showed a significant clustering phenomenon in the southern part of China. The relative elevation and the population had an impact on the distribution of the IMGNs. The largest number of the names occurred where the relative elevation was between 1000-2000 m and where the population was between 40-50 million. Density of unnamed interprovincial mountain geographical entities declined from west to east in China. The analysis of generic names of different types of IMGNs implied that the naming of IMGNs is inconsistent. Based on these analyses, it is suggested that the government should take the IMGNs as management units, strengthen the naming of unnamed interprovincial mountain geographical entities, standardize the generic names of IMGNs and identify areas of poverty based on the survey of IMGNs.

Comparative performance assessment of landslide susceptibility models with presence-only,presenceabsence,and pseudo-absence data

The quality of the data for statistical methods plays an important role in landslide susceptibility mapping.How different data types influence the performance of landslide susceptibility maps is worth studying.The goal of this study was to explore the effects of different data types namely,presence-only(PO),presence-absence(PA),and pseudo-absence(PAs) data,on the predictive capability of landslide susceptibility mapping.This was completed by conducting a case study in the landslide-prone Honghe County in the Yunnan Province of China.A total of 428 landslide PO data points were selected.An equivalent number of nonlandslide locations were generated as PA data by random sampling,and 10,000 sites were uniformly selected at random from each region as PAs data.Three landslide susceptibility models,namely the information value model(IVM),logistic regression(LR) model,and maximum entropy(MaxEnt) model,corresponding to the three data types were investigated.Additionally,the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves(ROC-AUC),seven statistical indices(i.e.accuracy,sensibility,falsepositive rate,specificity,precision,Kappa,and Fmeasure),and a landslide density analysis were used to evaluate model performance regarding landslide susceptibility mapping.Our results indicated that the MaxEnt model using PAs data performed the best and had the highest fitness with the highest ROC-AUC values and statistical indices,followed by the IVM model with only landslide data(PO),and the LR model using PA data.Using PAs data avoided the inherent over-predictive shortcomings of PO data by limiting the predicted area of high-landslide susceptibility.Additionally,the random sampling design of landslide PA data increased the uncertainty of landslide susceptibility mapping and influenced the performance of the model.Therefore,our results suggested that the PAs data sampling provided a useful data type in the absence of high-quality data.Finally,we summarized the principles,advantages,and disadvantages of the three data types to assist with model optimization and the improvement of predicted performance and fitness.

GraphCWGAN-GP:A Novel Data Augmenting Approach for Imbalanced Encrypted Traffic Classification

Encrypted traffic classification has become a hot issue in network security research.The class imbalance problem of traffic samples often causes the deterioration of Machine Learning based classifier performance.Although the Generative Adversarial Network(GAN)method can generate new samples by learning the feature distribution of the original samples,it is confronted with the problems of unstable training andmode collapse.To this end,a novel data augmenting approach called Graph CWGAN-GP is proposed in this paper.The traffic data is first converted into grayscale images as the input for the proposed model.Then,the minority class data is augmented with our proposed model,which is built by introducing conditional constraints and a new distance metric in typical GAN.Finally,the classical deep learning model is adopted as a classifier to classify datasets augmented by the Condition GAN(CGAN),Wasserstein GAN-Gradient Penalty(WGAN-GP)and Graph CWGAN-GP,respectively.Compared with the state-of-the-art GAN methods,the Graph CWGAN-GP cannot only control the modes of the data to be generated,but also overcome the problem of unstable training and generate more realistic and diverse samples.The experimental results show that the classification precision,recall and F1-Score of theminority class in the balanced dataset augmented in this paper have improved by more than 2.37%,3.39% and 4.57%,respectively.

The changing patterns of cropland conversion to built-up land in China from 1987 to 2010

Over the past few decades, built-up land in China has increasingly expanded with rapid urbanization, industrialization and rural settlements construction. The expansions encroached upon a large amount of cropland, placing great challenges on national food security. Although the impacts of urban expansion on cropland have been intensively illustrated, few attentions have been paid to differentiating the effects of growing urban areas, rural settlements, and industrial/transportation land. To fill this gap and offer comprehensive implications on framing policies for cropland protection, this study investigates and compares the spatio-temporal patterns of cropland conversion to urban areas, rural settlements, and industrial/transportation land from 1987 to 2010, based on land use maps interpreted from remote sensing imagery. Five indicators were developed to analyze the impacts of built-up land expansion on cropland in China. We find that 42,822 km2 of cropland were converted into built-up land in China, accounting for 43.8% of total cropland loss during 1987-2010. Urban growth showed a greater impact on cropland loss than the expansion of rural settlements and the expansion of industrial/transportation land after 2000. The contribution of rural settlement expansion decreased; however, rural settlement saw the highest percentage of traditional cropland loss which is generally in high quality. The contribution of industrial/transportation land expansion increased dramatically and was mainly distributed in major food production regions. These changes were closely related to the economic restructuring, urban-rural transformation and government policies in China. Future cropland conservation should focus on not only finding a reasonable urbanization mode, but also solving the ＂hollowing village＂ problem and balancing the industrial transformations.

Values of the Farmland Ecosystem Services of Qingdao City, China, and their Changes

The values of farmland ecosystem services are composed of several components: provisioning service value, regulating service value, supporting service value and cultural service value, so it is important to make a full assessment of the values of farmland ecosystem services for agriculture and farmland protection. Here, we assessed the values of farmland ecosystem services in Qingdao City in 1997, 2002, 2007, 2012 and 2017 by using various methods(market value method, carbon tax method, afforestation cost method, substitute cost method, equivalent factor method, etc.) based on establishing an assessment index system for the farmland ecosystem services value. The results show that the total yearly value of farmland ecosystem services increased from 499.74× 10~8 Yuan to 681.74× 10~8 Yuan in the period of 1997-2017, and the yearly value of farmland ecosystem services per hectare increased from 6.57× 10~4 Yuan to 9.73× 10~4 Yuan. The product provisioning service, carbon fixation service and oxygen release service, as well as the soil conservation service, are the main farmland ecosystem services, and the proportions of these four ecosystem service values to the total value of farmland ecosystem services in Qingdao City were large and kept increasing. Some countermeasures are put forward to adequately use the indirect service value of the farmland ecosystem and provide improved well-being for humans, such as protecting and wisely using farmland, developing agriculture that is rooted in local conditions, promoting agricultural production efficiency, speeding up construction of modern agriculture gardens, deepening the supply-side structural reform of agriculture, developing agricultural eco-tourism, etc.

Spatial distribution and influencing factors of interprovincial terrestrial physical geographical names in China

The interprovincial terrestrial physical geographical entities are the key areas of regional integrated management. In this paper, we analyzed the spatial patterns of the interprovincial terrestrial physical geographical names(ITPGN) from three aspects: numerical features, spatial variance and spatial agglomeration. The influencing factors of the distribution of ITPGN and the implications for the regional management were further discussed. GIS technology was used to visualize the distribution of ITPGN, analyze the spatial agglomeration and the influencing factors of ITPGN. A total of 11,325 ITPGN, including 4243 water ITPGN and 7082 terrain ITPGN, were extracted from the database of "China's Second National Survey of Geographical Names(2014–2018)", and the mountain geographical names were the largest type in ITPGN. Hunan Province had the largest number of the names in China, and Shanghai had the smallest number of the names. The spatial variance of the terrain ITPGN was larger than that of the water ITPGN, and the ITPGN showed a significant agglomeration phenomenon in the southern part of China. In addition, the relative elevation and the population had an impact on the distribution of the ITPGN. The largest number of the geographical names occurred in the regions where the relative elevation was between 1000–2000 meters, and where the population was between 40–50 million. Based on the analysis, it was suggested that the government should take the ITPGN as management units, optimize management strategies based on the characteristics of different types of ITPGN, strengthen the naming of unnamed interprovincial terrestrial physical geographical entities and balance the interests in the controversial ITPGN. This study demonstrated that GIS and spatial analysis techniques were useful for the research of ITPGN and the results could provide targeted management suggestions to realize coordinated development in the interprovincial regions.

Re-interpretation of the classical geopolitical theories in a critical geopolitical perspective

Struggling for supremacy between great powers and the rise or fall and regime change of great powers are all subject to the Geopolitical Law. Geographers should keep in step with the times, accurately grasp the national interests, and seize the opportunity to contribute to the great rejuvenation of our nation. However, due to lack of criticism on the history and philosophy of geopolitics, we can neither accurately understand the geopolitical theory, nor effectively put the geopolitical theory into practice. This paper introduces the development of critical geopolitics, summarizes the three characteristics of critical geopolitics, and interprets the four classical geopolitical theories accordingly. In order to simplify the interpretation process, this paper firstly presents an analytical framework for interpretation of four classical geopolitical theories; secondly, focuses on interpretation of "The Geographical Pivot of History" put forward by Mackinder according to the analytical framework; finally, critically summarizes the four classical geopolitical theories. Through the critical interpretation, this paper draws a conclusion that there are the scientific, hypothetical and conceptual classical geopolitical theories. The construction of classical geopolitical theories is based on the international geopolitical structure, spatial distribution of national interests and inter-state spatial conflict, in order to show the identity of theoretical constructor, so as to reflect the historicality, sociality, situationality and geographical knowledge – power structure of geopolitical theories.