Spatiotemporal coordination between a sports-tourism proxy subsystem and ecological conditions in Zhejiang Province, China, 2010–2024
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Sports tourism is closely related to ecological conditions, spatial resources and regional tourism-service capacity. Using 11 prefecture-level cities in Zhejiang Province as the study area, this study develops an evaluation framework comprising a sports-tourism proxy subsystem and an ecological subsystem for 2010–2024. The entropy-weight method, coupling coordination degree model, Global Moran’s I and exploratory spatial-association models are used to examine temporal variation, inter-city differences and conditional spatial associations in the coupling coordination degree.The ecological subsystem generally has a higher composite score than the sports-tourism proxy subsystem. This comparison reflects the selected indicators, standardization procedure and weighting scheme and does not independently demonstrate ecological stability or insufficient resource transformation. The coupling coordination degree follows a staged pattern of “early improvement–shock-related decline–gradual recovery”: it increased overall during 2010–2019, declined during 2020–2022 and increased again during 2023–2024. The cities exhibit distinct combinations of sports-tourism-related and ecological conditions, with Hangzhou and Wenzhou generally showing relatively high coordination levels. Global Moran’s I is negative in most years, but two-sided permutation tests based on 9,999 random permutations provide no evidence of statistically significant global spatial autocorrelation during 2010–2024. To reduce mechanical overlap with the construction of the coupling coordination degree, the spatial-association analysis uses external contextual variables, including GDP per capita, total employment, public-service expenditure, total water resources and ecological-space share. The exploratory spatial-association models identify conditional relationships between these local and neighbouring-city contextual variables and the coupling coordination degree. The findings provide a basis for comparing tourism-related and ecological conditions and for informing coordinated regional planning, but the aggregate index and observational spatial models should not be interpreted as direct evidence of causal interaction, ecological-service enhancement or ecological-resource transformation.
Source: Scientific Reports
Authors: Chenyong Liu, Nadia Samsudin, Xin Wei
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,690
OpenAlex ID: W7220418050