Tourists’ Perceived Attitudes toward the Famous Terraced Agricultural Cultural Heritage Landscape in China

Abstract

Terraces are the major vehicle for agricultural activities in mountainous areas and are an important component of the agro-cultural heritage landscape. This work explores tourists’ perceived attitudes toward, and characteristics of terraced agro-cultural heritage landscapes based on online web travel notes. A framework of visitor perception types of terraced agricultural cultural heritage landscapes was constructed, and each type was analyzed in a targeted manner. The results obtained can provide a reference for the conservation of heritage farming culture and the development of strategies to improve landscape quality for such sites. This study used crawler software to collect online travelogue data from 3991 notes by visitors to seven note-worthy terraced agro-cultural heritage sites in China and used the ROST Content Mining 6 tool to analyze high-frequency feature words, semantic networks, and sentiment distribution and ten-dency. We found that the tourist perception of the diversity of terraced agro-cultural heritage landscape is rich, with a high overall evaluation. The tourists‘ perceptions focused on four elements: landscape, ecology, culture, and service. They were more likely to have a high perception of the landscape than service, which in turn was higher than culture and ecology. The emotional tendency of tourists‘ perceptions is mainly highly positive and neutral, and negative emotions account for a lower proportion and are mostly mild.

Keywords

• terraced fields
• agricultural cultural heritage
• landscape
• perception
• travel notes
• tourist