Study on the Spatiotemporal Differentiation of Traditional Villages and the Factors Influencing Tourism Responsiveness: A Case of Three Provinces and One Municipality in the Yangtze River Delta Region of China

The development of traditional village tourism destinations is an effective way to ensure the inheritance and development of traditional villages. Scientific analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution patterns and influencing factors of traditional villages can provide a scientific basis and decision-making reference for the protection and development of traditional villages. This study focuses on the development of traditional village tourism in the Yangtze River Delta region, including the provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, and the city of Shanghai, and evaluates the tourism responsiveness of village attributes, ecology, socio-economics, and tourism vitality using 14 indicators. This study investigated the spatial and temporal differentiation characteristics of traditional villages at different spatial scales in the Yangtze River Delta region using entropy, TOPSIS, spatial autocorrelation analysis, and a geographic detector. Key findings included (1) spatial differentiation of "high in the southeast and low in the northwest"; (2) Jiangsu leading in tourism responsiveness and Anhui lagging behind; (3) low tourism responsiveness despite the abundance of resources in traditional villages; and (4) the vitality of tourism and the socioeconomic environment are crucial to responsiveness. In summary, although traditional villages are distributed in clusters, their tourism economic potential is still not fully tapped.