Classification of Recreation Opportunity Spectrum Using Night Lights for Evidence of Humans and POI Data for Social Setting

Wenjing Zeng, Yongde Zhong, Dali Li and Jinyang Deng
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Wenjing Zeng: Forestry College, Central South University of Forestry and Technology, Changsha 410004, China
Yongde Zhong: Forestry College, Central South University of Forestry and Technology, Changsha 410004, China
Dali Li: Forestry College, Central South University of Forestry and Technology, Changsha 410004, China
Jinyang Deng: Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources Program, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 999039, USA

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 14, 1-14

Abstract: The recreation opportunity spectrum (ROS) has been widely recognized as an effective tool for the inventory and planning of outdoor recreational resources. However, its applications have been primarily focused on forest-dominated settings with few studies being conducted on all land types at a regional scale. The creation of a ROS is based on physical, social, and managerial settings, with the physical setting being measured by three criteria: remoteness, size, and evidence of humans. One challenge to extending the ROS to all land types on a large scale is the difficulty of quantifying the evidence of humans and social settings. Thus, this study, for the first time, developed an innovative approach that used night lights as a proxy for evidence of humans and points of interest (POI) for social settings to generate an automatic ROS for Hunan Province using Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial analysis. The whole province was classified as primitive (2.51%), semi-primitive non-motorized (21.33%), semi-primitive motorized (38.60%), semi-developed natural (30.99%), developed natural (5.61%), and highly developed (0.96%), which was further divided into three subclasses: large-natural (0.63%), small natural (0.27%), and facilities (0.06%). In order to implement the management and utilization of natural recreational resources in Hunan Province at the county (city, district) level, the province’s 122 counties (cities, districts) were categorized into five levels based on the ROS factor dominance calculated at the county and provincial levels. These five levels include key natural recreational counties (cities, districts), general natural recreational counties (cities, districts), rural counties (cities, districts), general metropolitan counties (cities, districts), and key metropolitan counties (cities, districts), with the corresponding numbers being 8, 21, 50, 24, and 19, respectively.

Keywords: ROS; night lights; POI; factor dominance; natural recreation resource (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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