Ancient villages are a unique landscape of cultural heritage with both tangible and intangible culture, which provide rich ecosystem services for human beings. Assessment of society’s perceptions on cultural heritage landscapes can improve the integration of cultural heritage values into decision-making processes that affect landscapes, thereby contributing to maximizing the benefits people receive from cultural ecosystem services. Based on this premise, a new sense-based hierarchical assessment framework for a cultural landscape of ancient villages in China from the perspectives of experts and the public was developed in this study. Field research was conducted by the experts to preliminarily extract the evaluation indicators by identifying and refining the characteristics of the landscape perception units based on the classification of village’s landscape resources. The public indicators as supplements were determined by the semantic and social networks generated with ROSTCM tool post-processing, which followed crawling public comments on the tourism platforms with Python. The findings indicated that visual stimulation (57.36%) is the strongest, while touch perception is the weakest (3.56%). The proportion of hearing, smell, and taste was 21.52%, 12.05%, and 5.53%, respectively. Furthermore, people consider variety, historicity, culture, and localism as the core themes of perception in their landscape experiences. The value and usefulness of the sensory experiences for cultural landscape assessment and for decision-making in the context of cultural ecosystem services are discussed.

More from our Archive

• DOI: 10.3390/su151310543 2023

  The State of the Art in Deep Learning Applications, Challenges, and Future Prospects: A Comprehensive Review of Flood Forecasting and Management

  Vijendra Kumar, Hazi Md. Azamathulla, Kul Vaibhav Sharma, Darshan J. Mehta, Kiran Tota Maharaj

• DOI: 10.3390/su151410821 2023

  Microplastics as an Emerging Threat to the Global Environment and Human Health

  Shampa Ghosh, Jitendra Kumar Sinha, Soumya Ghosh, Kshitij Vashisth, Sungsoo Han, Rakesh Bhaskar

• DOI: 10.3390/su151310663 2023

  Unraveling the Interrelationship of Digitalization, Renewable Energy, and Ecological Footprints within the EKC Framework: Empirical Insights from the United States

  Najia Saqib, Ivan A. Duran, Ilhan Ozturk

• DOI: 10.3390/su151310645 2023

  Green Environmental Management System to Support Environmental Performance: What Factors Influence SMEs to Adopt Green Innovations?

  Abdalwali Lutfi, Hamza Alqudah, Mahmaod Alrawad, Ahmad Farhan Alshira’h, Malek Hamed Alshirah, Mohammed Amin Almaiah, Adi Alsyouf, Mohammed Faisal Hassan

• DOI: 10.3390/su151411065 2023

  Green Finance, Enterprise Energy Efficiency, and Green Total Factor Productivity: Evidence from China

  Hepei Li, Chen Chen, Muhammad Umair

• DOI: 10.3390/su151310729 2023

  Innovations and the CO2 Emissions Nexus in the MENA Region: A Spatial Analysis

  Haider Mahmood, Maham Furqan, Najia Saqib, Anass Hamadelneel Adow, Muzaffar Abbas

• DOI: 10.3390/su151310442 2023

  Sustainable Potato Growth under Straw Mulching Practices

  Abdul Waheed, Chuang Li, Murad Muhammad, Mushtaq Ahmad, Khalid Ali Khan, Hamed A. Ghramh, Zhongwei Wang, Daoyuan Zhang

• DOI: 10.3390/su151310329 2023

  From Neglect to Progress: Assessing Social Sustainability and Decent Work in the Tourism Sector

  Eleonora Santos

• DOI: 10.3390/su151410976 2023

  Driving Sustainable Disaster Risk Reduction: A Rapid Review of the Policies and Strategies in Saudi Arabia

  Ahmed M. Al-Wathinani, Dennis G. Barten, Marta Borowska-Stefańska, Paweł Gołda, Noora A. AlDulijan, Mohammad A. Alhallaf, Lujain O. Samarkandi, Abdullah S. Almuhaidly, Mariusz Goniewicz, Waleed O. Samarkandi, Krzysztof Goniewicz

• DOI: 10.3390/su151410940 2023

  Wastewater Treatment and Reuse for Sustainable Water Resources Management: A Systematic Literature Review

  Jorge Alejandro Silva