A Conservation-Oriented Trail Planning Method for the Laoniuwan Great Wall Built Heritage Landscape: Historical Interpretation, Visitor Accessibility, and Protection Constraints

Visitor access in linear defensive built heritage landscapes needs to balance historical interpretation, route accessibility, and current protection constraints. This issue is evident in the Laoniuwan section of the Ming Great Wall in Shanxi Province, China, where heritage nodes lie within a scenic area but access infrastructure and interpretive route organization remain underdeveloped. This study proposes a conservation-oriented trail planning method for Great Wall scenic areas by combining MaxEnt-based historical defensive landscape modeling with GIS-based contemporary resistance analysis. MaxEnt was used to model terrain- and visibility-related suitability for defensive node locations, including watchtowers, beacon towers, forts, and mamian. The output was treated as a historical landscape interpretation layer, not as a prediction of tourist movement or final route location. Contemporary resistance was built from terrain ruggedness, road and village disturbance, the Great Wall protection buffer, permanent basic farmland, and the ecological conservation redline. Three historical–contemporary weighting scenarios were compared using least-cost path analysis. A Conservation–Interpretation Balance Index (CIBI) was then used to support scenario selection. The 4:6 scenario achieved the highest CIBI score (0.606). It maintained connectivity among defensive nodes while reducing ecological and farmland conflicts. The recommended loop trail was further translated into a four-tier conservation management zoning scheme. The results offer a spatial decision support approach for organizing fragmented built heritage resources into controlled-access interpretation routes with reduced disturbance to heritage fabric and protected land.