Participatory evaluation of rural historic landscape based on the 3D e-Sandbox:A case study in Duimenshan Village in Guizhou Province

Understanding the trend in historical rural landscape evolution could support decision-making and governance for sustainable rural development. Local villagers are the necessary source of knowledge on the changes in historical rural landscape, they can play an extremely important role in the restoration of rural landscapes. However, the platform for intuitively and interactively supporting various stakeholders in participating in the restoration of historical rural landscapes is still short. The objective of this study was to excavate the landscape memory and local knowledge, and then to restore and evaluate the rural historical landscape changes using more acceptable way for local villagers. This paper took Duimengshan Village, Zhenfeng County of Guizhou Province as the case study. The landscapes were analyzed in four historical periods (1958, 1980, 1995 and 2015) for restoration using the 3D e-Sandbox tool and participatory rural appraisal. The results showed that local villagers could easily participate in landscape restoration processes using the 3D e-Sandbox tool. Although the land was divided into households from 1980, the production and lifestyle of the villagers had no structural changes due to the local conditions, leading to insignificantly landscape changes. However, the proportion of paddy fields in Duimenshan Village decreased rapidly since the introduction of large-scale tobacco cultivation in 1995. This also directly led to the ecological services value decreased significantly as the paddy field (a type of wetland) as an important contributor to the value of ecological services. Moreover, because of the rapidly increase and uniform distribution of public service facilities in the past 20 years, the landscape diversity had increased significantly. It was concluded that the 3D e-Sandbox could solve technical problems in participatory rural historic landscape restoration like the poor communications between planner and local people.