Impacts of Geospatial Factors on Village Site Selection Along the Great Wall Watchtower Based on Logistic Regression: A Case Study in Gubeikou Section, Beijing, China

Abstract

Abstract. The Great Wall was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1987. In recent years, the Chinese government placed significant emphasis on the preservation of the Great Wall and its invaluable resources. However, it remains challenging to quantitatively analyze the impact of multiple factors and further identify the Great Wall resource sites. In this paper, a spatial quantitative analysis framework with binary logistic regression is implemented for the impact factors of village site selection along the Great Wall watchtowers. Elevation, slope, orientation, water distance, road distance, distance-to-watchtowers were selected as candidates. 177 villages were analyzed, and the model calculation was assessed with the confusion matrix and ROC curve. Youden index is used to determine the optimal threshold for the uncertain villages, subsequently. And we classified villages into three categories: villages with strong, medium and weak relevance with Great Wall resource sites. Experimental results show that the strong and medium relevance villages accounted for 68.36%. These villages are primarily located in the central part of the study area, characterized by flat terrain and closely aligned with the road network. Village density decreases with distance from the watchtowers. Additionally, out of the 40 uncertain villages, 5 were confirmed as villages while the remaining were classified as non-villages. The conclusions of this study can serve as a reference for evaluating and predicting suitable conservation and planning initiatives for the Great Wall and its surrounding villages in the future.