Evaluation on tourism ecological security in nature heritage sites —Case of Kanas nature reserve of Xinjiang, China

The nature heritages are the precious legacy of nature with outstanding scientific and aesthetic value. They are quite different from other common ecotourism areas, because of its original and unique system, sensitive and vulnerable landscape, and peripheral cultural features. Therefore, the tourism development in the nature heritage sites should be on the premise of ecological security. The evaluation index system of tourism ecological security in nature heritage sites was constructed in this article by AHP and Delphi methods, including nature ecological security, landscape visual security and local culture ecological security, and the security thresholds of indices were also established. In the indices’ weights of the evaluation model, the nature ecological security ranked the highest, followed by tourist landscape visual security and culture ecological security, which reflected the influence degree of the limited factor to tourism ecological security. Then, this paper carried out an empirical study of Kanas of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China, which has the potential to be the World Nature Heritage. On the basis of the data attained from survey and observation on the spot, as well as questionnaire answered by tourists and local communities, the ecological security status in Kanas was evaluated. The result showed that the status of Kanas tourism ecological security was better, but there had some limiting factors. Lastly, effective measures were put forward to ensure its ecological security.