A Heritage-Oriented Evaluation Framework for Differentiated Conservation of Mountainous Traditional Villages: A Case Study of Three Villages in the Southern Taihang Mountains, China

Mountainous traditional villages may possess valuable inherited landscapes and cultural heritage while differing markedly in their capacity to maintain, interpret, and appropriately use these resources. This mismatch means that a lower overall evaluation score does not necessarily indicate weaker conservation value, and that villages within the same region may require fundamentally different conservation priorities. To explore this issue, this study developed a heritage-oriented resource–service diagnostic framework and applied it to Xiaodianhe, Liyu, and Xuebaizhuang villages in the Southern Taihang Mountains, China. A three-criterion, 15-indicator system combined expert-derived AHP weights with five-grade assessments from 180 respondents, supported by field investigation, UAV imagery, and resource inventories. Traditional heritage resources received the highest criterion weight (0.5490), while the overall scores of Xiaodianhe, Liyu, and Xuebaizhuang were 4.163, 3.751, and 3.168, respectively. More importantly, these scores concealed three distinct conservation situations: Xiaodianhe showed relative resource–service coordination; Liyu retained strong inherited resources but was constrained by targeted deficiencies in interpretation, internal routes, and stay-support conditions; and Xuebaizhuang retained resource potential despite substantial gaps in accessibility, management, and community participation. The comparison demonstrates that differentiated conservation should respond to the internal relationship between inherited resources and service-support conditions rather than to composite rankings alone. Accordingly, conservation actions should be sequenced according to whether a village primarily requires heritage-quality maintenance, targeted service improvement, or basic support-capacity enhancement, while safeguarding authenticity, integrity, landscape continuity, and community continuity.