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Land
Special Issues
Rural Tourism Development: Land Use, Ecosystem Services, and Community Interactions
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Rural Tourism Development: Land Use, Ecosystem Services, and Community Interactions

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Land Socio-Economic and Political Issues".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2025 | Viewed by 4527

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Ioan Sebastian Jucu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Geography, Faculty of Chemistry, Biology, Geography, West University of Timisoara, Timișoara, Romania
Interests: human geography; cultural tourism; urban geography; regional geography
Dr. Cătălina ANCUȚA

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Geography, Faculty of Chemistry, Biology, Geography, West University of Timisoara, Timișoara, Romania
Interests: human geography; rural geography; territorial systems

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to submit your work to this Special Issue on “Rural Tourism Development: Land Use, Ecosystem Services, and Community Interactions”. Since research on issues surrounding rural tourism that are connected to ecosystem services and community interactions remains largely overlooked, submissions to this Special Issue should cover the intersection of all aspects of the sustainable development of rural areas through tourism, land use, and community interactions. Rural tourism represents a niche field promoting local sustainability and sustainable economic and cultural development in local areas, aiming to ensure cultural capitalization and heritage preservation in line with the care of all environmental features of places and regions. This Special Issue seeks to empower impactful research by revealing the potential of rural tourism to adopt land use ecosystem services and community interactions that facilitate a transition to sustainable rural environmental systems. Placed within a rapidly growing body of literature that is dedicated to the exploration of how rural tourism develops, land use ecosystems services, cultural community interactions, and cutting-edge research on rural tourism and the cultural development of places, this Special Issue contributes to the discourse by describing how rural tourism can be successfully integrated with local policies in rural development to address contemporary challenges in sustainable rural development. Moreover, in this Special Issue, the spotlight will be on exploring applications of rural tourism through the lens of circular community interaction principles. We are particularly interested in manuscripts that comprehensively examine how rural tourism development is designed through the lens of land use ecosystems services and community interaction, and how it can transform rural areas into developing places and regions, ensuring sustainable development. Submissions that solve original scientific problems in the field of rural tourism, covering aspects closely related to land use, ecosystem services, and community interactions, are in the form of original research articles, opinions, and reviews.

This Special Issue welcomes both original research articles and review papers that link the following themes:

  • Advances in rural land use changes and landscapes based on the rural and cultural tourism potential of rural habitats;
  • Economic spatial changes in rural areas based on the recent industrial changes;
  • The emergence of service-led activities in rural areas as a consequence of rural–urban spatial interactions;
  • Rural and cultural tourism studies, ecotourism, and cultural community interactions;
  • The capitalization of the cultural heritage of rural areas through the lens of contemporary trends in local and regional economic development;
  • Sustainable rural development through tourism, land use change, and community interactions.

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Dr. Ioan Sebastian Jucu
Dr. Cătălina ANCUȚA
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • rural land use change
  • rural tourism development
  • rural tourism and socio-economic interaction
  • rural cultural heritage
  • cultural tourism in rural areas

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

22 pages, 26182 KiB  
Article
The Use of Public Spaces in Traditional Residential Areas After Tourism-Oriented Renovation: A Case Study of Liu Xing Street in Yining, China
by Dilidaner Dilixiati and Simon Bell
Land 2025, 14(5), 1041; https://doi.org/10.3390/land14051041 - 10 May 2025
Viewed by 231
Abstract
Public spaces in historical and cultural cities not only provide places for social interaction in people’s daily lives but also help visitors engage with local history and culture. Although extensive research has been conducted on the use of public spaces, little has been [...] Read more.
Public spaces in historical and cultural cities not only provide places for social interaction in people’s daily lives but also help visitors engage with local history and culture. Although extensive research has been conducted on the use of public spaces, little has been conducted on cities in developing countries, such as cities in Xinjiang, China. Therefore, this research selected a public space in a traditional Uyghur residential area in Yining, which is located in the northwest of Xinjiang, to investigate the current usage of public space in the context of the growing tourism industry. We employed behaviour mapping as the primary method for data collection and analysed it using ArcGIS. A total of 3052 data points were collected over a five-day observation period. We found that while a wide range of activities were observed at the study site, only a few took place with high frequency. The influence of the facilities at the study site on users’ behaviour is significant. In terms of spatial distribution, the number and diversity of activities also show a concentrated distribution in a certain sub-area. Therefore, the conclusions suggest that it is important to conduct post-use evaluations to investigate the attitudes and perceptions of local residents. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rural Tourism Development: Land Use, Ecosystem Services, and Community Interactions)
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19 pages, 2926 KiB  
Article
Evaluating the Progress of Tourism in a Less-Developed Area of China: A Tourism Development Index Approach Based on Night-Time Light and POI Data
by Xuan Liu, Guohui Zhou, Hanlin Wang and Ergang Wen
Land 2025, 14(2), 338; https://doi.org/10.3390/land14020338 - 7 Feb 2025
Viewed by 787
Abstract
Understanding the status and progress of tourism is a critical step for formulating sustainable tourism strategies. A traditional statistical data-based evaluation of tourism development is costly and time-consuming. Recently, remote sensing data and geospatial big data allow the rapid and convenient observation of [...] Read more.
Understanding the status and progress of tourism is a critical step for formulating sustainable tourism strategies. A traditional statistical data-based evaluation of tourism development is costly and time-consuming. Recently, remote sensing data and geospatial big data allow the rapid and convenient observation of socioeconomic development and provide opportunities for the cheap and updated analysis of tourism development. This study develops a tourism development index to quickly catch the development status of tourism in one city with open-access night-time lighting (NTL) data and point-of-interest (POI) data. The index is applied to evaluate the tourism development in Yunnan Province, a less-developed region in China, and compared with the traditional statistical data-based evaluation. The results show the following: (1) The index constructed with open-access data offers a cheap and fast way to evaluate the status of tourism development and could obtain a result similar to the traditional statistical data-based method. (2) Tourism development in Yunnan Province is uneven, with two tourism centers significantly surpassing the others: Kunming and Lijiang–Dali. (3) An increasing polarization has characterized the progress of tourism among cities in Yunnan Province over the years. This study is an attempt to rapidly evaluate tourism development using only open-access data, which could play a positive role in saving public management costs in less-developed areas. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rural Tourism Development: Land Use, Ecosystem Services, and Community Interactions)
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19 pages, 2621 KiB  
Article
The Importance of Automatic Counters for Sustainable Management in Rural Areas: The Case of Hiking Trails in Historic Villages of Portugal
by Ana Luque and Luiz Alves
Land 2025, 14(1), 61; https://doi.org/10.3390/land14010061 - 31 Dec 2024
Viewed by 912
Abstract
The dynamics of territorial planning, the management of its tourism products, and the monitoring of demand flows and their impact on the territorial structure (social, economic and environmental) require tools that support the acquisition of reliable quantitative data, as far as possible in [...] Read more.
The dynamics of territorial planning, the management of its tourism products, and the monitoring of demand flows and their impact on the territorial structure (social, economic and environmental) require tools that support the acquisition of reliable quantitative data, as far as possible in real time, that are easy to manage and allow immediate analysis. In the case of structures and equipment anchored in the nature tourism segment, in particular hiking trails, in addition to determining the demand indices in a network of hiking trails and understanding their territorial and temporal dynamics, the data collected through automatic counters is a crucial tool to support territorial management and evaluate the patterns and flows of tourist demand. Based on these assumptions, this research seeks to analyse demand data observed on eleven hiking trails in the Historic Villages of Portugal, collected through automatic monitoring systems (counters). In four years, between 2020 and 2023, the trails analysed generated a demand of almost 190,000 passages, which translates into an annual average of 47,500 passages in the tourism product “Historic Villages of Portugal” (more than 4800 passages for each trail), mostly in the spring and autumn months, mainly on weekends. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rural Tourism Development: Land Use, Ecosystem Services, and Community Interactions)
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21 pages, 8342 KiB  
Article
Research on the Influencing Factors of Art Intervention in the Environmental Graphics of Rural Cultural Tourism Space
by Jingchun Zhang, Xiaodong Liu, Zhiyu Feng and Xinqun Feng
Land 2024, 13(10), 1680; https://doi.org/10.3390/land13101680 - 15 Oct 2024
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1715
Abstract
In the development of rural revitalization, the art intervention in rural cultural tourism has become a hot topic recently. With the advent of the new media era, it is particularly important to study the factors that affect the artistic value of environmental graphic [...] Read more.
In the development of rural revitalization, the art intervention in rural cultural tourism has become a hot topic recently. With the advent of the new media era, it is particularly important to study the factors that affect the artistic value of environmental graphic design. This study proposes six dimensions of environmental graphic design for rural cultural tourism through literature analysis and experience summary, which are refined into 21 impact indicators. It is based on the case of the environmental graphic publicity of cultural tourism in Chongqing Nanshan Cattle Village, using the SBE beauty evaluation method to evaluate the influencing factors, while using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to measure each indicator. The consistency of the two evaluation methods verifies the feasibility of the influencing factors, and this study found the influence of visuality, cultural nature, artistic nature, interactivity, spatiality, and communicativeness on aesthetic value. Moreover, the core of environmental graphic design lies in information transmission, in which artistic nature occupies an important position, while cultural nature, although it has a relatively small weight in aesthetic value, cannot be ignored in social media communication. In terms of visual design, a reasonable layout of equipment significantly enhances visual appeal, while spatial adaptability is considered a key factor. This paper emphasizes the integration of art principles into design to promote sustainable development, while also pointing out that the identification of rural cultural symbols can enhance visitors’ cultural experience. In terms of interactivity, it is crucial to encourage visitors to actively participate and share their experiences, while communication emphasizes the important impact of exposure to rural scenes on brand communication. This research provides systematic theoretical support and practical guidance for the environmental graphic design of rural cultural tourism. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rural Tourism Development: Land Use, Ecosystem Services, and Community Interactions)
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