The adaptive evolution of cultural ecosystems is a distinctive process along the Silk Road in China, involving the transitional interaction of nature and culture. This study aims to provide theoretical recommendations for the management of cultural heritage sites along the Silk Road to assess the values and keep the balance between tourism development and cultural heritage protection. The paper focuses on 22 cultural sites in western China to study the adaptive evolution pattern of cultural landscapes along the Silk Road with landscape changes and the transmission patterns of modern cultural tourism. Based on relevant literature reviews, historical maps, and geomorphological maps, the factors influencing the evolution of the cultural ecosystem are explored. We present both the theoretical and managerial implications: the cultural heritage of the urban areas can vigorously develop the cultural tourism with a high degree of industrialization, suburban areas can boost up traditional tourism product routes. We also assume that the degree of development of cultural tourism depends on the cultural ecosystem service and the environmental status of the cultural landscape.

Accelerating the construction of transportation networks has become an important bridge to promote the urbanization of heritage tourism destinations. Based on the development dilemma of tourism towns in northwestern China, this study collected the panel data of 10 cities in Shaanxi Province from 2006 to 2019 and used a panel error correction model to investigate the long-term and short-term relationships between heritage tourism and new urbanization. In addition, this paper establishes a regression model of the transportation network’s regulatory effect, revealing the extent of the impact of the transportation network on heritage tourism and new urbanization. The results show that (1) in the short term, the influence of heritage tourism on new urbanization is not remarkable, but in the long term, heritage tourism plays a positive role in facilitating new urbanization; (2) the short-term contribution elasticity of new urbanization to heritage tourism is less than that in the long term; (3) the regulatory effect of the transportation network rectifies the deviation caused by overdeveloped urbanization to moderate development in heritage tourism destinations.

The continuous improvement in the design and manufacture of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has enabled them to assist humans in aerial tasks. At present, UAVs are not only used for environmental data collection, but also used by photographers to take photos. As the popularity of consumer UAVs rises, an increasing number of tourists are transitioning from the traditional perspectives of mobile phone and hand-held camera photography to the aerial perspective of UAV photography. Therefore this study examines UAV photos and related data uploaded by photographers within China and Europe to the UAV forum SkyPixel by using cloud-based data from Microsoft Azure vision, and sentiment, social network and spatial analyses. In addition, this paper also investigates the commonalities and differences between the behaviors and preferences of photographers who utilize UAV photography recreationally. The results indicate that the core content of UAV photography revolves around three major themes: natural landscapes, destination transportation facilities, and the daily behaviors of people. However, photographers in China mainly exhibit neutral emotions, while European photographers display mostly positive emotions. Hot spots are concentrated in mature tourist areas, especially top destinations near waterbodies. This study fosters a new understanding of the emerging group of UAV users.