Geotourism is a tourism activity that enables visitors to learn about geology, geography, and other related disciplines by investigating a series of geological heritage, features, and landscapes[1, 2]. Modern geological tourism originated in the national park movement in the United States in the 18th century and first began in the Hot Spring National Conservation Area, established in Arkansas in 1832 [2, 3]. In the early 20th century, several developed European and American countries conducted various forms of geological tourism activities. Over time, geological tourism developed into an important new type of tourism.
The geopark—a unique natural area composed of a geological landscape with a certain scale and distribution range as the main body that simultaneously integrates other natural and cultural landscapes—is an important carrier and platform for geological tourism activities due to its special geologically scientific significance, rare natural attributes, and high aesthetic appreciation value.
Countries across the world have established national nature reserves (e.g. scenic spots, national parks, mining parks) and are assiduously developing geological tourism. As of August 2023, there were 177 global geoparks in the world, distributed in 50 countries and regions. China is one of the countries with the most abundant geological tourism resources, the fastest developing geological tourism industry, with the most tourists. At present, there are 272 and 41 global and national geoparks in China, respectively. Owing to the huge development potential of the tourism industry, increasingly more scholars, both at home and abroad, are paying attention to geological tourism[4, 5].
In 1989, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Union of Geosciences (IUGS), the International Geological Correlation Programme (IGCP), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) established the Geological Sites Programme in Washington, D.C. with the aim of selecting suitable geological sites as candidates for inclusion in the World Heritage List. In 1997, the United Nations General Assembly adopted UNESCO’s proposal of ‘promoting the formation of a global network of scenic spots with special geological phenomena’. According to this plan, representative and special areas from the geological heritage sites recommended by various countries (regions) are selected for transformation into geoparks to ensure social, economic, and tourism sustainable development. In 1999, UNESCO proposed the UNESCO Geoparks Plan, which seeks to establish 500 geoparks globally, with 20 new geoparks planned annually. China is one of the pilot countries of the global geopark initiative. The growing Global Geoparks Network (GGN) now has 100 members in 30 countries and regions around the world[6, 7].
In terms of the research content, domestic and foreign researchers are focused on research applications, and the results are mostly concentrated in geological tourism resource classification and development, the geological park construction and management, and exploring the geological value and potential of geological tourism development. However, while foreign countries tend to pay more attention to theoretical issues (e.g. the basic concept of geological tourism and the relationship between regional development) China focuses more on practical issues such as geological tourism resource evaluation and development and product development strategies and feasibility and capacity analyses[2, 8].
In terms of research perspective, the study of geological tourism mostly assesses problems from a single perspective, such as geoscience (including geology, geography, geomorphology, structural geology, petrology), and lacks an integrated and systematic study from the perspective of statistics, geology, geography, tourism, and other disciplines.
In terms of research objects, there are obvious differences in the focus of the existing research results on geological tourism. In terms of the subject and object of tourism, there are significantly more research results on the object of tourism activity (geological tourism resources) and its spatial carrier (geopark) than on the subject of tourism activity (geological tourists) and media (service system) [2, 9].
In terms of research scale, most scholars study geological tourism from a mesoscopic perspective (e.g. one or several individual national geoparks) while there are few studies from a macroscopic perspective (e.g. China, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas) [10, 11].
The main research method is qualitative analysis, although the number of studies employing quantitative analysis is gradually increasing. Before the 1980s, the early geological tourism research at home and abroad was mainly based on descriptive qualitative analysis; that is, exploring physical objects, cases, descriptive statistics, etc. to explain the development of geological tourism, resource types, and characteristics. From the 1980s, greater emphasis was placed on the use of literature analysis, questionnaire surveys, interviews, and case analysis, and the number of studies employing quantitative analysis gradually increased. Since the 21st century, increasingly more quantitative analysis methods (e.g. hypothesis testing, spatial analysis methods, and analytic hierarchy processes) have been applied to geological tourism research, and combined with qualitative analysis, the research methods are more abundant and perfect[2, 12]. However, quantitative research methods such as mathematical statistics analysis and ArcGIS spatial analysis are rarely used to study the temporal-spatial distribution and evolution characteristics of tourist number, tourism income, type of market and the space-time evolution of Hot-cold spots of geological heritage by integrating various methods[13, 14, 15, 16, 17].
Therefore, this study adopts 272 Chinese geoparks as examples, and employs ArcGIS technology and temporal-spatial analytical methods from a macro scale to quantitatively investigate the spatial distribution characteristics of geological heritage. The results reveal the market types and space-time evolution of hot-cold spot of Chinese geological heritage in 2010 and 2022. Furthermore, this study presents the existing problems and countermeasures for the development of Chinese geological heritage to accurately grasp the distribution, development pattern, and evolution characteristics of Geological heritage in the study area as a whole.