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As a type of tourist destination, Protected Areas (PAs) have been the focus of recreation ecology research since their establishment. The contradiction between recreation and ecological protection of PAs in China is more prominent than in other countries because of China's large population density and complex PA management system. Thus, a review of related research is urgent for promoting sustainable tourism development of PAs in China. Combining quantitative analysis with a literature review, this study analyzed the historical development process and current research topics of recreation ecology in China's PAs, focusing on the impacts of tourism on the natural environment, environmental management of tourism, and the development of different types of sustainable tourism in PAs. Overall, the research gaps are as follows: (1) studies on impact mechanism of tourism based on long-term monitoring are lacking; (2) the existence of numerous local communities in most of the PAs in China is usually ignored; (3) insufficient attention has been paid to the impacts of tourism infrastructure construction; (4) assessments of sustainable PA tourism are lacking. Correspondingly, this paper presents implications for future research and serves as a reference for PA tourism management in other countries.

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Tourism is a significant way for the public to enjoy the cultural ecosystem services provided by protected areas (PAs). However, with PAs being expected to make much wider ecological, social and economic contributions to sustainability and human well-being, PA managers face challenges in coordinating tourism with other goals, such as ecological conservation and local community development. To address this challenge, we developed a sustainability assessment framework that considers the PA, local community, and tourism as a complex system comprising social, economic, and ecological subsystems from the perspective of subsystem relationships. The coupling coordination degree model and the obstacle degree model were applied to assess sustainability of the tourism system in Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve of China. The assessment results indicate that the sustainability index fluctuated between 2010 and 2019, but generally exhibited an upward trend, undergoing three stages and reaching the stage in 2019 where ecological sustainability took the lead. At this stage, the coupling coordination degree between the economy and society subsystems was at its lowest, and the economic subsystem faced the highest obstacle degree. The study demonstrates that involving scholars and administrators in the index selection process and considering both index information and management concerns when determining index weight makes the coupling coordination degree model more suitable for PA tourism systems. The assessment method developed in this study effectively reflects the temporal evolution of PA tourism system sustainability and provides valuable implications for coordinated ecological-economic-social management by analyzing obstacle factors.