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Article

Public Concern and Awareness of National Parks in China: Evidence from Social Media Big Data and Questionnaire Data

by
Yaquan Dou
1,
Changhao Wu
2 and
Youjun He
1,*
1
Research Institute of Forestry Policy and Information, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing 100091, China
2
School of Computer Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 2653; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032653
Submission received: 19 November 2022 / Revised: 29 January 2023 / Accepted: 29 January 2023 / Published: 1 February 2023 / Corrected: 16 November 2023
(This article belongs to the Section Tourism, Culture, and Heritage)
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Abstract

:
The high quality development of national parks plays an important role in promoting the formation of a reasonable, moderate and orderly land space protection pattern and building a harmonious coexistence of human and nature. However, a lack of public participation has limited the development of high-quality national parks in China. Understanding public concern and awareness of national parks is necessary for promoting greater public participation. This paper provides insight into this problem by combining Weibo and questionnaire survey data, then uses a combination of text mining, a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) theme model, and descriptive statistics to analyze the current state of public concern and awareness of national parks. By analyzing Weibo data, we find: (1) Public concern for national parks is increasing year by year. (2) More economically developed regions may pay more attention to national parks. (3) Public concern for national parks focuses on the construction of national parks in other countries and the institutional reform and ecotourism of national parks in China. Meanwhile, we also find that: (1) Most of the public are willing to actively pay attention to the construction of national parks. (2) The public is not yet fully aware of national parks in China; for example, the number of national parks, their construction, and other issues are still not widely known. (3) Public awareness of the construction goals, functional positioning, and other issues are not generally understood. To sum up, there is still much room for the public to improve their control and awareness of national parks. Finally, we put forward some suggestions to improve the public’s concern with and awareness of national parks, which can promote public participation in their development. This study will be important for sustainable development of the natural reserve system and global biodiversity protection in China.

1. Introduction

Biodiversity is the basis for human survival and development. The establishment of reserves is an important way to maintain biodiversity [1] (Jones et al., 2022), and the sustainable development of reserves cannot be achieved without the support of the public and their active participation in the conservation of natural resources [2] (Fiallo et al., 1995). There is a significant relationship between public awareness, attitudes, and participation in reserves such as national parks [3] (Sirivongs et al., 2012). A prerequisite for ensuring active public participation is to first understand public awareness of reserves and how public awareness is influenced by different factors [4] (Belkayali et al., 2016). At the individual level, broad cultural knowledge and value orientation forms the basis for awareness, and awareness will influence the public’s attitude towards the establishment of reserves, which in turn drives public participation in reserve development [5,6] (Teel et al., 2010; Cebrián-Piqueras et al., 2020). In general, a positive attitude of the public toward reserves is highly correlated with the effectiveness of reserve management [7] (Allendorf et al., 2006). For example, in El Salvador, Central America, as the public’s awareness of esthetics, landscape recreation, and other social values provided by forests increases, support for the establishment of urban reserves is strengthened, thus enhancing the biodiversity and economic benefits of the reserves [8] (Carr et al., 2022). Meanwhile, a superficial awareness of reserves and a negative attitude are not conducive to the sustainable development of reserves. For instance, Fiallo and Jacobson (1995) found that in Ecuador, a lack of public participation in the establishment of national parks and misunderstanding of the concept of national parks led to the public holding various negative attitudes towards national parks, which will affect their development and management [2]. Likewise, Htay et al. (2022) conducted an interview with 230 peasant households around a wildlife reserve in Indawgyi Wildlife Sanctuary, Myanmar, and they found that, although the public had a positive attitude towards the reserve, their low participation indicated that their attitudes were not strong enough to inspire them to participate in environmental conservation, which hindered the development of the local reserves [9]. Therefore, public awareness and attitude is a key factor that affects the development of reserves and is also a potential factor that affects participation in collective action [10] (Sullivan et al., 2017). In order to enhance the public’s intention to participate, the primary consideration should be to enhance the public’s basic awareness, information awareness, and value awareness of reserves, as well as to improve public attitudes and stimulate public willingness to participate, so as to achieve sustainable development of reserves [11].
As an effective type of natural reserve, national parks have expanded and evolved around the world. Since the establishment of Yellowstone national park in the United States in 1872, national parks have been established in more than 100 countries around the world. National parks have a significant role in protecting biodiversity, maintaining the stability of ecosystems, and promoting harmony between humans and nature. However, the ecological protection and recreation functions of national parks cannot be achieved without the active participation of the public [12,13] (Zhang et al., 2021). As we know, the willingness of the public to participate in the construction and development of national parks depends heavily on the public’s awareness, attitude, and value s [14] (Rodríguez et al., 2019). Due to the differences in economic development, social culture, and resource endowment of each country or region, the public’s concern and awareness about the establishment and development of national parks are also different [15] (Keigley et al., 2018). For instance, 55.65% of the community residents in southern Ethiopia have a negative attitude towards wildlife conservation, while 18.26% of them are indifferent to reserve management, and public participation in national parks is low, resulting in lions and other wildlife not being effectively protected and even being killed in retaliation [16] (Tekalign et al., 2016). Meanwhile, in Slovakia, 45% of respondents have a positive attitude towards the establishment of national parks, 29.5% have a neutral attitude, and 25.5% have a negative attitude, and personal economic status, relationship with tourism, age, education, and occupation affect the attitude of local people towards national parks [17] (Janetta et al., 2020). In Vietnam, 79.2% of the local residents have a positive attitude towards wetland protection in Xuan Tai Ramsar National Park, although their awareness of the value of wetlands and the significance of establishing the National Park is low, but 84.3% of respondents are willing to sacrifice part of their income to protect the wetland area in the national park [18] (Truong et al., 2021). Additionally, groups with different cultural backgrounds have different attitudes towards the development and utilization of national parks. For example, one study found that Malaysian domestic tourists are more receptive than international tourists to the activities, services, and other facilities associated with the tourism industry in national parks [19] (Ghazvini et al., 2020). Similarly, in the USA, Hispanic and Black people generally have lower awareness of national parks than white people, and awareness of national parks significantly affects their willingness to visit them [20] (Xiao et al., 2018).
Recently, China has made an important contribution to promoting global biodiversity protection, promoting the harmonious coexistence of human and nature, and building community cooperation. On 12 October 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping announced at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) Leaders’ Summit that China has officially established the first national parks in China, including Sanjiangyuan, Panda, Northeast Tiger and Leopard, Hainan Tropical Rainforest, and Wuyi Mountain. This national park system will be the largest in the world, covering a combined area of 230,000 square kilometers, and is expected to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity and the maintenance of national ecological security. Meanwhile, China is actively building a natural reserve system with national parks as the main body, to maximize the conservation of biodiversity and contribute to the global governance of the environment [21] (Dou et al., 2018). Construction of high-quality national parks needs both the governments’ vigorous promotion and the public’s active participation. Realizing this vision will require achieving several key goals: establish a sound mechanism for public participation, guide public participation in the construction and management of national parks, truly realize the “common construction, common governance” model, and fully reflect the function of national park as “public welfare” [22] (Luo, 2019). Due to weak awareness of ecological protection, some community residents do not pay attention to the construction of national parks [23] (Mao et al., 2020), and they do not understand that national parks are a new type of protected area. Most of the public do not know what the goals of national parks are, and their awareness of national parks is rather one-sided [24] (Zhang et al., 2021), which results in the constructions of national parks progressing slowly [22] (Luo et al., 2019).
There is a new trend toward incorporating social concern and awareness research into natural reserve research [23] (Mao et al., 2020). Many scholars are mainly focusing on survey data, public attitudes towards reserve establishment [25,26,27,28] (Ayivor et al., 2020; Jennifer et al., 2020; Sinthumule et al., 2021; He et al., 2022), and value awareness [29,30,31] (Gallardo et al., 2021; Daniel et al., 2021; Duan et al., 2022). However, this traditional social survey method is easily affected by social bias and small-sample error, resulting in biased conclusions [32] (Soriano-Redondo et al., 2017). With the popularity of the Internet and the development of related technologies, the use of “big data” analysis for scientific research has become an important trend [33] (Ghani et al., 2019). Meanwhile, the spread and use of social networks have provided a rich source of data for scientific research and are now widely used in various disciplines [34] (Cécile et al., 2022). Big data analysis provides several useful features, such as real-time processing, storage, and processing of massive datasets [35] (Rawat et al., 2021). The mining and visualization of large amount of data generated by users in social media has provided new ideas and methods for domestic and foreign scholars to conduct scientific research [36] (Stieglitz et al., 2018). Twitter, a widely used social media platform, has become an important tool for science communication in the research community [37] (Joanne et al., 2022), and many scholars have conducted research using data collected from Twitter [38,39,40,41,42,43,44] (Abdulateef et al., 2022; Maryam et al., 2022; Sunitha et al., 2022; Prasad N.et al., 2022; Chinnasamy et al., 2022; Paraskevas et al., 2022; Kassens-Noor et al., 2019). Researchers have conducted similar types of studies on the issue of national park public awareness. Rumbidzai (2021) analyzed the text content and emotion of tweet data from users referencing seven South African National Parks, with the goal of understanding public concern and emotion regarding national parks and provide a reference for managers of national parks [45]. Pragya (2021) assessed the content and sentiment of 9,000 tweets posted by more than 4,500 Twitter users in more than 90 countries to gain insight into the public’s concern for and awareness of national parks in Nepal [46]. Pickering (2020) used public tweets on Twitter about wildlife conservation in national parks to understand public concern for and awareness of environmental management issues [47]. There are several problems with social media data sources like Twitter, Naver, and Daum, such as geographic bias, specialized searches, and short texts, and sensitivity to specific events and news [46] (Pragya et al., 2021). However, such data are still useful to national park management departments, helping them to better understand the opinions of the public and international community [45] (Rumbidzai et al., 2021).
Based on the above analysis, foreign scholars have used social media platforms, questionnaire surveys, interviews, and other methods to conduct research on public concern and awareness of national parks, which can better guide the practice of national park construction. However, the existing research on national parks in China has not focused on public concern and awareness. Therefore, this paper will focus on the public concern and awareness of national parks. We use a combination of Weibo and a questionnaire survey to analyze the public’s concerns about and awareness of national parks in China. Then, we propose some ways to improve the public’s concern and awareness of national parks, so as to enhance public participation in national parks, which can promote high-quality development (Figure 1).

2. Materials and Methods

Big data involves processing large amounts of data information. By focusing on the overall patterns behind the data, the personalized patterns behind data may be lost, and these personalized patterns sometimes have greater value. When mining the overall pattern of big data, we also need to pay attention to the personalized patterns and use the personalized information in small data to supplement the overall patterns observed in big data. Therefore, this paper combines the big data approach of analyzing Weibo text and questionnaire survey data. First, we use web crawler technology to analyze the information from Weibo users. Then, we construct an LDA theme model to identify the types of topics users focus on. Additionally, we carry out a nationwide online questionnaire survey. Finally, we further clarify the public’s concern and awareness of national parks through the analysis of the questionnaire data. These results are informative about the public’s concern and awareness of national parks (Figure 2).

2.1. Big Data—Weibo Text Mining

According to Sina’s official statistics as of December 2021, Weibo had 573 million monthly active users and an average of 249 million daily active users, making it one of the most popular social media platforms in China [48] (Jin et al., 2021). Data collected from Weibo posts referencing the term “national park” from 1 November 2013 to 30 April 2022 were used for this paper.

2.1.1. Collection of Weibo Data

The rapid growth of online information resources has made traditional search engines unable to meet the demand for useful information access, and web crawler technology is particularly important as a component of search engines [49,50] (Chakrabarti et al., 1999; Zhang et al., 2021). A focused crawler is a web crawler that selectively crawls pages related to a predefined topic [51] (Fu et al., 2010). Compared to general-purpose web crawlers, focused crawlers only need to crawl pages related to a particular topic. Fewer pages must be searched, and pages can be updated faster, which saves hardware and Internet resources but still satisfies the need for domain-specific information. Because of these advantages, this paper used a focused web crawler to collect Weibo data (Figure 3).
This study used Python 3.9.5 to obtain data from the Weibo platform, and the procedure is as follows: (1) Login simulation. Login was simulated on the web page (http://login.sina.com.cn/ (accessed on 1 May 2022)) using the username and password of your Weibo account. (2) Web search. The time period from 1 November 2013 to 30 April 2022 was selected, and “national park” was used as the keyword to obtain the initial link. (3) Data collection. Data were collected using the focused web crawler method and Python 3.9.5 to obtain relevant data, including post information (e.g., username, content, posting time, number of retweets, number of likes and comments) and the corresponding post user information (e.g., identity information, region, gender). (4) Data saving. Eligible data were saved in an Excel file.

2.1.2. LDA Theme Model

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) has good data dimensionality reduction ability and model scalability, which is widely used in various text analysis tasks [52] (Blei et al., 2003). As we know, the application of the LDA model covers many fields, such as theme exploration, knowledge organization, academic evaluation, emotional analysis, and recommendation research. It is well known that the LDA model has some limitations in dealing with dynamic short texts (less than 10 characters) [53] (Cai et al., 2018). In order to eliminate this effect, we only considered posts of more than 10 characters when we preprocessed the Weibo data. Scholars in China and abroad have conducted research on social media data such as Weibo and Twitter using the LDA model [54,55,56] (Srijith et al., 2017; Xiong et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2021). Therefore, based on previous studies, this paper will use this model to analyze the theme of Weibo data and clarify the public’s concerns about national parks.
(1) Text preprocessing: In this paper, we used Excel Smart Toolbox to batch process and select 190,178 individual posts as the data source to build an LDA theme model. In the construction of the LDA theme model, the feature words of the document were extracted from the text, but there were often words with high frequency but no real meaning in the unstructured document set. These were usually called “stop words” during text processing. Therefore, based on the Chinese common stop words list (HIT stop words list, Baidu stop words list), this paper combined with the document lexical annotation and word frequency statistics by LDA, and deleted the words “national park” which appeared frequently. Then we put conjunctions, exclamations, numerals, prepositions, pronouns and other words into the stop words list, which will exclude these contents. We continuously expanded the contents of the stop words list until a better classification effect was achieved.
(2) LDA modeling analysis: The LDA theme model is a three-layer Bayesian probabilistic model for generating themes (Figure 4). The LDA theme model was used to model the set of keywords to obtain the intensity matrix of the theme-document. In this paper, we used the LDA toolkit in Python to train the model on document data, select different numbers of topics (K), perform multiple clustering for different time periods, compare the correlation between keywords in each topic with different numbers of topics, and select the most reasonable number of topics for the study.

2.2. Analysis of Small Data—Questionnaire Survey Data

In order to deeply analyze the public’s concern for and awareness of national parks, we conducted a questionnaire survey. We selected some questions about public concerns in the questionnaire drawing on the hot themes of Weibo users, gathered from the results of the big data analysis. We also chose some questions about public awareness of national parks based on the establishment goals, development planning and other policy documents of national parks. After repeated modification and improvement, we designed a questionnaire in three areas: “basic information, concern, and awareness” (Table A1).
Because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we mainly used an online survey in this paper. First, we designed and published the questionnaire on the Questionnaire Star platform (https://www.wjx.cn/vj/w7UC10q.aspx, accessed on 24 May 2022), so that respondents could quickly and easily complete the questionnaire. Then, we distributed questionnaires to more potential investigators through WeChat. Finally, we summarized all the questionnaire results to the questionnaire star platform and analyzed the results using Excel and SPSS. A total of 2511 valid questionnaires were collected, which came from different regions in 34 provinces (except Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan), during the period of 1 April–31 May 2022 through the Questionnaire Star platform.

3. Results

3.1. Analysis of Weibo Data

Since the national parks management system was proposed in 2013, the overall trend of national parks concern among Weibo users has been gradually increasing (Figure 5). Especially in 2017, after the promulgation and implementation of the “General Plan for Establishing National Park System”, the number of Weibo posts about national parks on Weibo has increased significantly, indicating that the public’s concern about national parks has been increasing with the formulation and implementation of national policies. Additionally, the “General Plan for the Establishment of National Park System” clearly states that by 2020, the pilot project for the establishment of a national parks system will be completed, a number of national parks will be integrated and established, a unified management system at different levels will be established, and the overall layout of national parks will be formed. Therefore, the individual posts about national parks on Weibo reached a maximum in 2020, which also indicates that the practice of constructing of national parks can also increase the public’s concern for national parks.

3.1.1. User Information Analysis

Among all users who posted on Weibo about “national park”, about 51% were male and 49% were female, which indicates that gender had no significant influence on the concern on construction and development of national parks. However, there was a large difference in the location of Weibo users (Figure 6). The color bar in the lower left corner of the graph indicates the number of posts. Blue indicates areas with fewer posts, and red indicates areas with more posts. Among them, the number of users in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong Province was higher, which may be related to the economic development of the region. The economies of these three regions are relatively developed, the public may pursue spiritual needs after satisfying the basic economic needs, so they may also pay more attention to the cultural services provided by the national parks, such as ecotourism and nature education. Additionally, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen have faster and more channels for the public to receive information, so there is likely more opportunity to become aware of the construction and development of national parks. As a “living fossil” and “Chinese national treasure”, the panda is highly valued both domestically and internationally, and Panda National Park in Sichuan Province has attracted many tourists. Therefore, in order to further increase the visibility and influence of Panda National Park, Sichuan’s institutional users posted more to Weibo about the construction and development of national parks. Weibo users in Shandong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces also paid more attention to the information about national parks. However, Weibo users in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region had low concern about national parks, probably due to the backwardness of information technology and ideology. Additionally, although Qinghai Province is actively building a “national park province”, the local Weibo users’ concern over national parks was not high.

3.1.2. Hot Topic Analysis

Currently, when using the LDA theme model, most scholars often determine the optimal number of topics by calculating the degree of perplexity [52] (Blei et al., 2003). However, with the development of technology and improvement of methods, topic consistency is now an effective way to determine the optimal number of topics, so this paper uses topic consistency to determine the optimal number of topics about national parks [57] (Roder et al., 2015). As shown in Figure 7, when the number of topics is 6, the consistency of topics is the highest. Combined with the pyLDAvis visualization results (see the left area of Figure 7), it is clear that when the number of topics K = 6, there is the least overlap between topics, and the topics are classified best. Therefore, the final number of topics used in this paper is 6.
Using the results of the LDA theme model, the top 10 key feature words of each topic in the 6 topics were selected, and the scene description was carried out according to the high-probability feature words under each topic, and the topic that most conforms to the high-probability feature words under this topic was summarized. For example, in Theme 2, the words construction, management, system, pilot, work, and China are closely related to the establishment of the pilot national park system in China. Dealing with the relationship between conservation and development is an important task for the establishment of the pilot national park system in China, and therefore, Theme 1 is summarized as “national parks in China institutional pilot construction”. In Theme 6, Qinghai, Sanjiangyuan, and Northeast Tiger and Leopard are the first batch of national parks in China, while wildlife, conservation, park, and administration are some of the achievements of the construction of national parks. This theme can be summarized as “the achievements of the construction of national parks in China”. Similarly, the final results of the national park public concern themes were grouped into 6 major categories (Table 1). As shown in Table 1, themes 1 and 3 are public concerns about national parks in other countries, and themes 2, 4, 5, and 6 are public concerns about the construction and development of national parks in China. Among them, Weibo users were more concerned about the basic construction of national parks in other countries, such as the United States, which was the first country to establish a national park, and Canada, which was the first country to establish a national park management bureau. They were also concerned about the protection of wildlife in national parks in other countries, and they are interested in elephants and lions in South Africa and other regions. For national parks in China, Weibo users will not only pay attention to the pilot construction of the national park management system, but also the natural landscape of the national park. They also have greater interest in ecotourism, hoping to experience the natural beauty of national parks firsthand.

3.2. Analysis of Questionnaire Results

The results regarding the basic information of respondents (Table 2) show that the gender proportions of respondents were: 47.14% male and 52.86% female. Additionally, 68.38% of respondents were in the age group 18-30 years old. The proportion of respondents who had received higher education or above was 80.36%. By analyzing the reliability and validity of the questionnaire, we find α = 0.749 > 0.7, which shows that the reliability of the questionnaire is very good (Table 3). As shown in Table 4, the value of KMO is 0.880 > 0.8, which indicates that the questionnaire data is very effective. Furthermore, we conducted a T-test on each question in the questionnaire (Table A2). The results have statistical significance. Therefore, these results indicate that the distribution of respondents’ results was reasonable.

3.2.1. Analysis of Public Concern

According to the results of the questionnaire survey, 68.94% of respondents had heard of “national parks” before (Figure 8a). Among those respondents who had heard of “national park”, only 33.97% of them really had a good understanding of “national parks”, while 66.03% of them had only superficial understanding (Figure 8b). This indicates that most respondents were still in the early stages of understanding national parks and did not have extensive knowledge about them. When respondents who had heard of “national parks” (only 12.48% of all respondents) were asked how many official “national parks” they know of in China, (Figure 8c), only 19.44% of them answered correctly that there were 5. Some of them thought there were 10, and others thought there were many more, indicating that although most of the respondents had heard of “national park”, their awareness of “national park” was still far from adequate. The public can learn about national parks through various channels such as TV, WeChat, and Weibo. Sixty percent of the respondents learned about national parks through new media such as Weibo and WeChat. Some respondents (23.03%) learned about national parks from their friends, teachers, classmates, and other people, while fewer respondents (16.97%) learned about national parks through traditional media such as newspapers, radio, and television (Figure 8d). This indicates that the new media is the mainstream way for the public to learn about the concept of “national park”, and it is also an effective vehicle for the relevant departments to promote national parks. Meanwhile, the results of the questionnaire show that respondents were most concerned about the ecological resource protection function of national parks (46.78%), followed by the development of the tourism industry in national parks (24.57%), while respondents were less concerned about community development in national parks (3.29%), concessions (0.79%), and other aspects such as nature education (Figure 8e). On the one hand, this indicates that public concern and awareness of national parks remain focused on the traditional aspects, and the more nontraditional functions of national parks, such as research and education, remain beyond most of the public’s awareness. On the other hand, it also shows that the country is not effectively publicizing the many functions of national parks, and the more nontraditional functions of national parks have not yet been fully developed.
Currently, the national park is in a period of high quality construction and needs the active participation of the public. When the respondents were asked whether they are willing to actively pay attention to the “national park”, the majority (66.79%) of the respondents said they were willing to take the initiative to pay attention to the “national park”, while some (33.21%) were not willing to take the initiative to pay such attention (Figure 9). On the one hand, these respondents who were less willing to take an active interest in national parks may think that the construction and development of national parks is the obligation and responsibility of the government and not closely related to themselves. The willingness of the majority of the public to take an active interest in national parks can promote the quality development of national parks to a certain extent, but those respondents who were not willing to take an active interest in national parks present a challenge to the successful construction and development of these parks.

3.2.2. Analysis of Public Awareness

The public’s awareness of national parks is an important manifestation of the effectiveness of the construction of national parks, and it is also necessary for the development of public participation in national parks. Among respondents, 78.40% of them thought that a national park is a national natural reserve, and some of them (21.60%) thought that a national park is a national scenic spot (Figure 10a). Although neither description is entirely accurate, they reflect the respondents’ awareness of national parks to some extent. Probably due to the influence of traditional ideology, some respondents’ first reaction when they see “national park” was that it is similar to a city park, forest park, theme park, and other general park, which are public areas built and operated by the government as nature viewing areas and public rest and play areas. This indicates that the public’s awareness of national parks was still in a more traditional stage, and they did know how national parks differ from other types of public areas. The construction of national parks should achieve the goal of scientific protection and rational utilization of natural resources. In the survey, 77.45% of the respondents believed that national parks should develop tourism in a moderate way while adhering to ecological protection, and 22.55% of the respondents had a wrong perception of national parks (overprotection or overuse) (Figure 10b). This kind of lack of in-depth awareness is not only inconsistent with the goal of national park construction, but also not conducive to public welfare, a key component of national parks. Ecological protection, national representation, and public welfare are the three major concepts of the system of national parks in China [58] (Yang, 2017). The public’s awareness of these concepts will affect its willingness to participate. In the questionnaire survey, most of the respondents (48.25%) believed that “ecological protection” is the most important concept. The second most common response, “national representation”, accounted for 36.05%. This shows that only some of the respondents understood the fundamental concept of national parks. Meanwhile, a small number of respondents (17.35%) thought that “public welfare” should be the most important among the three concepts, which is obviously not the original purpose of establishing national parks in China, nor is it the primary task of constructing new parks (Figure 10c). National parks should reflect the public welfare shared by all people, but this should be achieved on the premise of ecological protection and national will. The entrance fee of national parks is an important manifestation of its public welfare, but it is reasonable to charge a certain amount of entrance fee for the public at the current stage [59] (Tang et al., 2016). However, 60.50% of the respondents thought that national parks should be open to the public for free (Figure 10d), which is not only incompatible with China’s national conditions and the resources necessary to create a park but also may not be conducive to the sustainable development of national parks.

4. Discussion

The construction of national parks plays an important role in addressing global climate change, alleviating the conflict between humans and nature, and mitigating the loss of biodiversity [60] (Yonk et al., 2020). China is building the world’s largest national park system at the fastest pace and with the greatest intensity in the world, and although the concept of the national park has been recognized and valued by governments and administrators at all levels, it may take some time for the general public to understand and have awareness about national parks as a new natural reserve system. The degree of awareness and willingness to participate in an ecological civilization is related to the economic development level of the region, with higher awareness in eastern China than in central and western China [61] (Zhao, 2017). Likewise, the public’s concern for national parks also shows significant geographical differences (Figure 6). In economically developed regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong, the government and the public are more concerned about the development of ecological civilization [62] (Zhang, 2018), while the public is more willing to pursue the spiritual and cultural aspects such as clean air, pleasant climate, and beautiful scenery after their material life is satisfied. Weibo users in these areas are likely to pay more attention to the progress of construction of national parks. In some regions (e.g., Xinjiang, Tibet, and Gansu), public awareness of the environment is still shallow due to relatively backward economic development [63] (Li et al., 2005). Access to information is also somewhat limited, which might contribute to public concern about national parks being lower.
With the continuous development of ecological civilization in China and the continuous development of national parks in different regions, the public’s concern for national parks is steadily increasing [23] (Mao, 2020), and most of the public were willing to actively follow the development of national parks through new media channels such as Weibo and WeChat. However, due to the deviation of the public’s understanding and awareness of the functions of national parks, their concern about national parks was mainly regarding the entrance fee, international and domestic comparison, location, and environmental protection [24] (Zhang et al., 2021). The strongest concerns were for ecological protection and tourism development [64] (Ma et al., 2021). Similarly, this study found that Weibo users not only focused on the construction of national parks in other countries, but also paid more attention to the ecological protection effectiveness and tourism industry development of national parks such as Panda, Sanjiangyuan, and Northeast Tiger and Leopard. In contrast, the public did not appear to be concerned with national park concessions and community development. This indicates that there is a gap between the public’s concern for national parks and the functional possibilities of national parks.
The public’s awareness of national parks will affect the future conservation and development of national parks, and it will take some time for the public to understand and recognize new things [5] (Teel et al., 2010). Since China proposed the establishment of a national park system in 2013, it took only eight years to formally establish a national parks system with a protected area of 230,000 km2. The rapid construction of national parks has made it difficult for the public’s understanding to keep up, resulting in a lack of awareness about national parks among community residents and tourists. In this study, it was also found that many members of the public still thought that national parks are similar to forest parks, wetland parks, and other scenic spots. Additionally, some people did not consider the actual situation in China and believe that national parks should be open to the public for free in order to reflect the public welfare of national parks. Additionally, most of the public was still unaware of the number of officially established national parks in China.
There are some shortcomings in this study. Firstly, the Weibo data collection has some limitations. For example, Weibo users do not include all age groups, as the elderly and children are missing or underrepresented. Meanwhile, the data is also not comprehensive due to the Weibo platform authority, and foreign social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook data are not included. Additionally, we only collected 2511 questionnaires using the online platform. Finally, we only analyzed the public concern for and awareness of national parks but did not analyze the specific factors that influenced awareness and understanding in depth. Therefore, future research can focus on these issues.

5. Conclusions and Suggestions

In this paper, Chinese public concern and awareness of national parks were evaluated using text mining and theme clustering of 190,178 individual posts from 1 November 2013 to 30 April 2022, as well as data analysis of 2511 questionnaires. An LDA theme model and descriptive statistics were used for analysis. The research results show that the current Chinese conception of national parks was focused on the construction of national parks in other countries and national park ecotourism. Meanwhile, although most of the public had heard of or learned about national parks through new media channels such as Weibo and WeChat, there were still some misunderstandings about national parks, especially regarding their purpose. Raising public awareness of the value of national parks is an important way to raise public awareness of biodiversity protection, and it is also a key task to alleviate the contradictory problems of conservation and development.
Therefore, based on the above analysis, this paper suggests the following aspects to improve the public’s awareness of and concern for national parks.
Firstly, we should strengthen policy guidance and publicize national parks through multiple channels. We can use Weibo, WeChat, short videos, official websites, and other new media to make national park publicity more innovative. Meanwhile, we can carry out publicity activities such as “National Park Theme Day”, “Walk Into National Parks”, and “The Most Beautiful National Park” to provide a platform for public concern about national parks.
Second, we should increase science education and explore methods to enhance the public’s awareness of national parks. One possibility is to introduce the concept of the national parks into school textbooks to cultivate students’ awareness of national parks and their important role in conservation. Additionally, we can encourage national parks to open various environmental education programs and nature experience opportunities for the public to enhance their awareness of national parks and conservation.
Third, we should expand the way the public obtains national parks information, improve the mechanism of public participation, and enhance the public’s participation in national parks. The government can establish an information disclosure system and improve mechanisms by which the public might provide feedback on public parks.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization and methodology, Y.D. and Y.H.; resources and data curation, C.W.; writing—original draft preparation, Y.D.; writing—review and editing, Y.D. and Y.H.; funding acquisition, Y.H. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This work was funded by Fundamental Research Funds for Youth Talent Program at the Central Level Nonprofit Research Institute “Study on Ecological Compensation and Management System in the National Park System Pilot Area”, grant number CAFYBB2017QC006; Preliminary Research of Key Engineering Project of State Forestry and Grassland Administration, grant number 500102-5105.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Appendix A

Table A1. “Chinese public concern for and awareness of national parks” questionnaire.
Table A1. “Chinese public concern for and awareness of national parks” questionnaire.
Questionnaire ContentBasic QuestionsOption Settings
Basic Information Gender Male
Female
Age groupUnder 18 years old
18~25
26~30
31~40
41~50
51 years old and above
Education Elementary and below
Junior and senior high school
higher vocational and specialized education Undergraduate
Graduate and above
ConcernHave you heard of “national parks” before?Yes
No
Are you willing to take an active interest in “national parks”?Yes
No
Do you really understand about “national parks”?Yes
No
Through what channels do you know about “national parks”?New media such as Weibo, WeChat
Traditional media such as newspaper, radio and television
Others (told by friends, teachers, and classmates)
Do you know how many official “national parks” there are in China?Know Not sure
What part of “national parks” is of more concern to you?Ecological resource protection, Surrounding community development, Tourism industry development, Franchise management, Others
AwarenessPlease select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “what are national parks”.National parks are the national natural reserve
National parks are the national scenic spot
Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “how to construct national parks”.National parks should be strictly protected and should not be developed and used
National parks are a public tourist attraction, and tourism should be developed vigorously
National parks should develop tourism moderately under the premise of ecological protection
Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “ the construction goal of national parks”. (The order of priority indicates the level of importance)National representation, public welfare, ecological protection first
Public welfare, national representation, ecological protection first
Ecological protection first, public welfare, national representation
Public welfare, ecological protection first, national representation
Ecological protection first, national representation, public welfare
National representation, ecological protection first, public welfare
How do you feel about the admission fee of “national parks”?National parks should be open to the public for free
National parks should charge a certain admission fee
Table A2. Single sample t-test analysis results for questionnaire.
Table A2. Single sample t-test analysis results for questionnaire.
Basic QuestionsMinMaxAverageSDtp
Gender 1.0002.0001.5290.49988.5950.000 **
Age group1.0007.0002.8851.22568.2140.000 **
Education 1.0005.0004.0920.901131.4250.000 **
Have you heard of “national parks” before?1.0002.0001.3110.46381.9320.000 **
Are you willing to take an active interest in “national parks”?1.0002.0001.3320.47181.8300.000 **
Do you really understand about “national parks”?−3.0002.0000.2092.1952.7540.006 **
Through what channels do you know about “national parks”?−3.0003.0000.1892.2532.4220.016 *
Do you know how many official “national parks” there are in China?−3.0002.0000.3572.2764.5390.000 **
What part of “national parks” is of more concern to you?−3.0005.0000.1792.2852.2680.024 *
Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “what are national parks”1.0002.0001.2160.41285.4900.000 **
Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “how to construct national parks”.1.0003.0002.6170.743101.9620.000 **
Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “ the construction goal of national parks”. (The order of priority indicates the level of importance)1.0006.0001.8720.90260.0730.000 **
How do you feel about the admission fee of “national parks”?1.0002.0001.3950.48982.5580.000 **
* p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01.

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Figure 1. Research framework.
Figure 1. Research framework.
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Figure 2. Research methodology.
Figure 2. Research methodology.
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Figure 3. The basic principle of a focused web crawler and its implementation process.
Figure 3. The basic principle of a focused web crawler and its implementation process.
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Figure 4. Document generation method of LDA theme model.
Figure 4. Document generation method of LDA theme model.
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Figure 5. Trend of user Weibo posting volume.
Figure 5. Trend of user Weibo posting volume.
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Figure 6. User distribution. Note: Weibo user data does not include data from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
Figure 6. User distribution. Note: Weibo user data does not include data from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
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Figure 7. Theme consistency.
Figure 7. Theme consistency.
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Figure 8. Public concern regarding national parks.
Figure 8. Public concern regarding national parks.
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Figure 9. Public willingness to take an active interest in national park development.
Figure 9. Public willingness to take an active interest in national park development.
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Figure 10. Public awareness of national parks. (a) Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “what are national parks”; (b) Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “how to construct national parks”; (c) Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “the construction goal of national parks”. (The order of priority indicates the level of importance); (d) How do you feel about the admission fee of “national parks”?
Figure 10. Public awareness of national parks. (a) Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “what are national parks”; (b) Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “how to construct national parks”; (c) Please select the statement from the description that best matches your awareness of “the construction goal of national parks”. (The order of priority indicates the level of importance); (d) How do you feel about the admission fee of “national parks”?
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Table 1. Theme-High Probability Feature Word Distribution.
Table 1. Theme-High Probability Feature Word Distribution.
Theme 1:
introduction to national parks construction in other countries		Theme 2:
system pilot construction of national parks in China		Theme 3:
wild life conservation of national parks in other countries
Key WordsRelevanceKey WordsRelevanceKey WordsRelevance
America0.014Conservation0.014Tourists0.007
Here0.009Ecology0.012Month0.007
World0.009Construction0.012Elephants0.005
Located0.009Management0.011Africa0.005
Most0.009Panda0.009Us0.005
Canada0.008China0.008Animals0.005
Travel0.007System0.008South Africa0.004
Waterfall0.007Work0.007Can0.004
Place0.007Pilot0.006Go0.004
New Zealand0.006Development0.006Discover0.003
Theme 4:
ecotourism development of national parks in China		Theme 5:
news video publicity of national parks in China		Theme 6:
effectiveness of national parks construction in China
Key WordsRelevanceKey WordsRelevanceKey WordsRelevance
Link0.027Shoot0.066Sanjiangyuan0.052
Page0.026Video0.058Northeast0.017
Travel0.009Photographer0.042Tiger and leopard0.012
Month0.007Take0.027Wild life0.011
Pudacuo0.006A0.024Qinghai0.011
Scenic Area0.006Panda0.021Conservation0.011
World0.006Mom0.016Parks0.009
Shangri-La0.005Photo0.014China0.007
Taiwan0.005Screen0.013Administration0.007
China0.004News0.011Rare0.006
Note: In the construction of the LDA model, “national parks” was placed as a high-frequency word in the stop word table; therefore, the key words such as “national” and “parks” did not appear in the table.
Table 2. Basic information of respondents.
Table 2. Basic information of respondents.
Basic Information OptionsProportionBasic Information OptionsProportion
Gender Male47.14%AgeUnder 18 4.89%
Female52.86% 18–2544.87%
Education Elementary school and below5.48% 26–3023.51%
Middle School, High School 14.16% 31–4014.68%
Higher vocational and specialized education12.05% 41–508.47%
Undergraduate37.32% 51–602.74%
Postgraduate and above30.99% Above 600.84%
Table 3. Cronbach Reliability Analysis.
Table 3. Cronbach Reliability Analysis.
Number of ItemsSample SizeCronbach α
1325110.749
Table 4. KMO and Bartlett’s test.
Table 4. KMO and Bartlett’s test.
KMO 0.880
Bartlett’s sphericity testApproximate chi square10,753.690
df78
p0.000
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Dou, Y.; Wu, C.; He, Y. Public Concern and Awareness of National Parks in China: Evidence from Social Media Big Data and Questionnaire Data. Sustainability 2023, 15, 2653. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032653

AMA Style

Dou Y, Wu C, He Y. Public Concern and Awareness of National Parks in China: Evidence from Social Media Big Data and Questionnaire Data. Sustainability. 2023; 15(3):2653. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032653

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Dou, Yaquan, Changhao Wu, and Youjun He. 2023. "Public Concern and Awareness of National Parks in China: Evidence from Social Media Big Data and Questionnaire Data" Sustainability 15, no. 3: 2653. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032653

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