1. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Beijing 100101, China;
2. Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 10039, China
Abstract：In recent years, much attention has been devoted to grassland tourism. This paper is to review the related research on grassland tourism with an emphasis on research contents, research region distribution and methodologies adopted.
The focus of grassland tourism research includes four aspects. They are grassland tourism resources, grassland tourism development, grassland tourism impacts and other related grassland tourism research. A great number of papers discuss the development and resources of grassland tourism, accounting for over 50% of the whole papers. However, little attention has been paid to the research on the markets of grassland tourism, the designing of tourism products and the operational mechanism of grassland tourism. As to the research region, it mainly concentrates in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Hebei, Xinjiang and Gansu provinces. Most of the studies use qualitative description as main methodology and emphasize on the expectation of future development; however, most papers lack the necessary assumptions and are far from strict mechanism study.
Based on the analysis of research contents, research regions and methodologies of the existing papers, we can get the following conclusions. Grassland tourism research mainly focuses on the subject of development and concentrates in certain regions; qualitative description is the commonly used method; the whole research is still in the preliminary stage. Therefore, studies on grassland tourism should be further widened and deepened with review being strengthened and methods being diversified. In the future, four key issues should be given special care. 1) The differentl development and the advancement of scientific and cultural connotation of grassland tourism; 2) Study on relative stakeholders of grassland tourism; 3) Study on tourism market and visitors' behavior; and 4) Study on the sustainable development of grassland tourism.
