A study of public concern and awareness of national parks in China from the perspective of “big data + small data” fusion

The high-quality development of national parks is an important way to protect biodiversity. Understanding public concern for and awareness of national parks is necessary to promote greater public participation in the management of national parks. A lack of participation by the Chinese public has limited the development of high-quality national parks in China. The present study provides insight into this problem by combining Weibo and questionnaire survey data and uses a combination of text mining, an Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA) theme model, and descriptive statistics to analyze the current state of public concern for and awareness of national parks. The results show that with the in-depth practice of ecological civilization construction, public concern of national parks is increasing year by year. Most Chinese residents are willing to actively pay attention to the construction of national parks, especially those in the more economically developed regions. Currently, 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. However, the public is not yet fully aware of national parks in China. The number of national parks, their construction, and other issues are still not widely known. Similarly, awareness of the construction goals, functional positioning, and other issues are not generally understood. This study will help policy makers to understand the public concern and awareness of national parks and provide a reference for the establishment of targeted public participation mechanisms, which will be important for development of natural reserve system in China and global biodiversity protection.