ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Land Use Dynamics
This article is part of the Research TopicNew Insights and Advancement of Land Use Analytics in Modern City DevelopmentView all 18 articles
Spatial Configuration and Sustainability: Decoding the Landscape Genes of Traditional Li Settlements in Hainan Island through a Production-Living-Ecological Space Framework
Provisionally accepted
- 1Hainan University School of Tropical Agriculture and Forestry, Haikou, China
- 2Zhanjiang University of Science and Technology, Zhanjiang, China
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The threat posed by global urbanization to cultural and natural heritage is a central concern of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11.4. Traditional Li settlements on Hainan Island, China, possess unique cultural, historical, and social values. However, they are increasingly vulnerable to rapid urban expansion and external cultural influences, which erode their distinctive spatial characteristics and threaten the sustainability of these rural landscapes. This study employs a Production-Living-Ecological (PLE) Space framework to analyze representative Li settlements. Utilizing low-altitude UAV multi-view photogrammetry, we have precisely extracted key spatial elements. Coupled with geospatial analytics and deep learning model training, our study comprehensively and quantitatively decodes the 'landscape genetic' information of traditional settlements, identifying 35 gene types across three categories. Key findings include: (1) Ecological genes manifest in terrain-responsive configurations under nature-culture co-adaptive siting mechanisms; (2) Productive genes demonstrate geomorphic-altitudinal progression with coupled farmland-settlement differentiation; (3) Living genes exhibit density-altitude polarity, showing an inverse relationship between boundary complexity and spatial legibility, alongside self-organizing evolutionary features. The integration of the PLE framework with landscape gene theory establishes a replicable protocol for the quantitative morphological decoding of traditional settlements. This framework provides evidence-based conservation strategies for rural cultural heritage within China's territorial planning and contributes methodologically transferable solutions to global sustainable urban-rural regeneration.
Keywords: Hainan Island, Landscape gene, Li settlements, Production-Living-Ecological (PLE), Traditional settlements
Received: 26 Nov 2025; Accepted: 09 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Yuan, Yang, Zhang, Chen and Meng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Dinghai Yang
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