Quantitative Methods, Applications, and Trends in Asian Tourism Research

This chapter states the purpose and goals of the entire book covering the status and future directions of quantitative tourism research in Asia. As an introductory part, this chapter describes the scope of the book and provides a brief explanation and summary of chapters. As such, this chapter highlights the research paradigm, philosophy and design, and other quantitative-specific dimensions before intruding on each chapter. The chapters of the book are divided into 3 main parts including understanding tourism industry in Asia (Part I), the current status of quantitative techniques (Part II), and future directions for Asian tourism researches (Part III). In fact, the introduction chapter implicitly discusses how tourism context might be different from the other settings and argues that the creation of knowledge even in quantitative data analysis to some extent is context dependent. Therefore, this chapter discusses an overview of data analysis strategies that is often overlooked by researchers

Soil pH, total phosphorus, climate and distance are the major factors influencing microbial activity at a regional spatial scale

Considering the extensive functional redundancy in microbial communities and great difficulty in elucidating it based on taxonomic structure, studies on the biogeography of soil microbial activity at large spatial scale are as important as microbial community structure. Eighty-four soil samples were collected across a region from south to north China (about 1,000 km) to address the questions if microbial activity displays biogeographic patterns and what are driving forces. These samples represented different soil types, land use and climate. Redundancy analysis and nonmetric multidimensional scaling clearly revealed that soil microbial activities showed distinct differentiation at different sites over a regional spatial scale, which were strongly affected by soil pH, total P, rainfall, temperature, soil type and location. In addition, microbial community structure was greatly influenced by rainfall, location, temperature, soil pH and soil type and was correlated with microbial activity to some extent. Our results suggest that microbial activities display a clear geographic pattern that is greatly altered by geographic distance and reflected by climate, soil pH and total P over large spatial scales. There are common (distance, climate, pH and soil type) but differentiated aspects (TP, SOC and N) in the biogeography of soil microbial community structure and activity