The high-quality development of culture and tourism is an important path for promoting the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy, urban-rural integration and development, and realizing common prosperity. This special issue focuses on the major issue of “rural revitalization and high-quality development of culture and tourism”, and contains 22 academic papers with in-depth discussions on five themes: “Rural revitalization and rural tourism high-quality development”, “rural tourism destination and homestay development”, “tourism environmental behavior and farmers’ participation in tourism”, “tourism resilience and tourism risk”, “cultural tourism and tourism high-quality development”. This collection of articles has three characteristics: Rich research areas and diverse research objects; diverse research methods that are inventive, logical, and scientific; and diverse theoretical viewpoints that span several disciplines. Considering the shortcomings of the current research, it puts forward future research directions such as strengthening localized theoretical research, expanding research areas and perspectives, and further deepening and enriching the research contents. In addition to supporting China’s efforts to promote high-quality culture and tourism, as well as comprehensive rural revitalization, this special issue can offer theoretical directions and actual experience in these areas.

The Beijing Winter Olympics brought a historical miracle to the development of China’s ice and snow tourism. It is both an opportunity and a challenge to reap the extra dividends of the times and to develop China’s ice and snow tourism. By selecting 18 academic papers, this special issue deeply discusses the status quo and the future measures of ice and snow tourism in China from three aspects: ice and snow tourism development and management, the ice and snow tourism experience and its influencing factors, and ice and snow tourism impact assessment. Moreover, one part entitled “Tourism Culture and Ecotourism” has been set up to emphasize those cutting-edge research topics. It is worth mentioning that this issue is in-depth and has profound connotations. First of all, the research area ranges from national to regional to the city-level, including both longitudinal and horizontal research. In additon, the research methods are practical, innovative, and at the frontier of scientific research, and include industrial correlation analysis methods, kernel density, spatial autocorrelation and other geospatial analysis methods, content analysis methods, sentiment analysis methods, structural equation models, Delphi methods, spatial statistics methods, geographic detector method and many others. In general, this special issue combines qualitative research with quantitative research, provides a variety of theoretical perspectives such as perceived value theory, institutional evolution theory, etc., and builds various useful models like the pre-competition evaluation model for ice and snow tourism heritage, the consumption skill-travel radius decision-making influence model under the moderating effect of the ski resort comprehensive leisure environment, the evaluation model of the suitability of glacier tourism resource development, the model of the relationship between tourists’ experience value and loyalty in the context of ice and snow tourism, among others. These studies are expected to provide theoretical and practical guidance for the development of ice and snow tourism in the post-Winter Olympics era, and help ice and snow tourism develop in a sustainable and high-quality direction.

Traditional agricultural heritage research has a very long history. Programme on “The conservation and adaptive management of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS)” initiative launched by FAO in 2002, aimed at not only preserving agricultural heritage system, but also applying the principle of dynamic conservation to promote rural development to benefit local community, to assure food security and maintaining the ecosystem. Since then, many more scientists have been enrolled in the new field focusing on the function and value, application and management, conservation and development and other aspects of these traditional agricultural systems which facilitate an emerging cross-discipline. In this paper, based on the concepts and characteristics of GIAHS and China Nationally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (China-NIAHS), the author specifies that Agri-cultural Heritage is a compound heritage that integrates the characteristics of natural, cultural and intangible cultural heritage, and a typical social-economic-natural complex ecosystem composed of economic, biological, technological, cultural and landscape components. For their conservation and development, the joint efforts of scientists from economics, ecology, geography, history, management sciences, culturology, ethnology, sociology and other subjects are needed. Based on progresses studies and perspectives of the field, the author felt that although a good start of the research on Agri-cultural Heritage has been made, there is still much room for development which show a steady growth trend and suggested 32 priority areas in research; a new subject of Agroheritology could emerge in the near future.

The goal of ecological civilization construction is to realize the harmonious coexistence of human and nature. Land is the spatial carrier of ecological civilization construction. Land use types or behaviors reflect the level of intensive use of land resources, leading to different ecological environmental effects, thereby affecting the level of regional ecological civilization construction. This issue, “Land Use and Ecological Civilization”, discusses the theory and method of land use management in the view of ecological civilization from the aspects of land use efficiency, land use change, land multi-functional trade-off, land ecosystem service and land ecological risk by selecting 14 representative papers, providing practical reference for the formation of the land use mode and behavioral system of ecological civilization. With abundant research levels, this issue covers varied research scales such as village, county and province, various landform types such as plain and hill, and typical land use areas at home and abroad such as East China, Central China, Northwest China, Yangtze River Economic Belt and Japan. Being frontier and practical, the multidisciplinary research methods in this issue include literature research method, fractal theory, qualitative comparative analysis, VAR model, and econometrics, among others. Focusing on the prominent problems in the process of land use, this issue deeply discusses the hot topics such as land ecological efficiency, spatial behavior characteristics, land use structure optimization and ecological risk assessment. This issue not only reviews the current literature on urgent land use issues such as arable land abandonment and land use risk, but also tries to conduct trade-off and synergy analysis on the varied functions of the rural landscape and ecosystem, thus providing a theoretical and empirical basis for solving land use problems from the perspective of ecological civilization. This issue reflects the realistic urgency of guiding land use with the concept of ecological civilization, and provides theoretical guidance and technical support from the aspects of methods and research framework. Finally, this issue proposes five hot topics in the field of land use research from the perspective of ecological civilization in the future, namely, ecological management of land use structure, ecological evolution mechanism of land use process, land ecological use mode, early warning and regulation of land ecological security pattern, ecological management and control of land use behavior.

Animal husbandry and crop farming are specialized for development in separate areas on the Tibetan Plateau. Such a pattern of isolation has led to current concerns of rangeland and farming system degradation due to intensive land use. The crop-livestock integration, however, has been proven to increase food and feed productivity thorough niche complementarity, and is thereby especially effective for promoting ecosystem resilience. Regional synergy has emerged as an integrated approach to reconcile rangeland livestock with forage crop production. It moves beyond the specialized sectors of animal husbandry and intensive agriculture to coordinate them through regional coupling. Therefore, crop-livestock integration (CLI) has been suggested as one of the effective solutions to forage deficit and livestock production in grazing systems. But it is imperative that CLI moves forward from the farm level to the regional scale, in order to secure regional synergism during agro-pastoral development. The national key R & D program, Technology and Demonstration of Recovery and Restoration of Degraded Alpine Ecosystems on the Tibetan Plateau, aims to solve the problems of alpine grassland degradation by building up a grass-based animal husbandry technology system that includes synergizing forage production and ecological functioning, reconciling the relationship between ecology, forage production and animal husbandry, and achieving the win-win goals of curbing grassland degradation and changing the development mode of animal husbandry. It is imperative to call for regional synergy through integrating ecological functioning with ecosystem services, given the alarming threat of rangeland degradation on the Tibetan Plateau. The series of papers in this issue, together with those published previously, provide a collection of rangeland ecology and management studies in an effort to ensure the sustainable use and management of the alpine ecosystems.

Since the 1970s, resource crisis, environmental pollution and ecological degradation have become prominent globally, and the limits to growth have always been an important theoretical and policy issue. The technological system of early warning and regulation based on carrying capacity evaluation has great potential in natural resource utilization, environmental management and ecosystem conservation. In this paper, the evolution of carrying capacity research and the concept of ecological carrying capacity are summarized, and the existing evaluation methods of ecological carrying capacity are classified into ecological footprint method, comprehensive index system method, ecosystem service analysis method and human appropriation of net primary productivity method. The current problems in ecological carrying capacity study were analyzed and the trend was outlooked. Combined with the special issue, the recent proceeding of ecological carrying capacity study in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) region was narrated, from the aspects of ecological carrying capacity evaluation method and application, the supply and consumption of ecosystem services, and the resources use and environment change. Some suggestions have been proposed to improve the accuracy and reliability of ecological carrying capacity evaluation: 1) the spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamic change of ecological carrying capacity should be explored furtherly; 2) the interaction between ecological process and human activities should be simulated; 3) factors such as climate change, human activities and ecological products and ecological service flows should be integrated into the evaluation system of ecological carrying capacity.

Ecological quality is defined as the stability, adaptability and resilience of an ecosystem. Monitoring and assessing ecological quality are important bases for China's ecological civilization construction. The national key research and development program “Technologies and guidelines for monitoring ecological quality of terrestrial ecosystems in China”, launched in July 2017, includes plans to study the observation technologies and provide guidelines on the ecological in-situ observation, the regional biodiversity and ecosystem function monitoring and its applications, all of which contribute to national ecological quality assessment. A year after its implementation, some important progress has been achieved, such as building the indicator system for comprehensive monitoring of ecological quality and improvement of the methods, mass data transmission, infrared camera-based monitoring of biodiversity, multi-angle automatic spectral observation systems, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based desert monitoring. We have organized this special issue and attempted to introduce the monitoring techniques and assessment methods on ecological quality from different perspectives in order to further promote the development of ecology and its observation methods.