Spatial Differentiation and Mechanisms of Spatial Mismatch Between Traditional Villages and Intangible Cultural Heritage: Collaborative Conservation Zoning and Strategies in Anhui Province, China

Traditional villages and intangible cultural heritage (ICH) are interrelated components of rural heritage landscapes, linking material spatial carriers with living cultural practices. Yet their spatial matching, mismatch-formation mechanisms, and translation into collaborative conservation zoning remain insufficiently understood. Taking Anhui Province, China, a north–south transitional region, this study examines 836 traditional villages and 685 ICH items at or above the provincial level. We develop a stepwise spatial diagnostic framework that connects clustering identification, positional and quantity–structure mismatch diagnosis, corridor and multi-factor association interpretation, and strategy-oriented conservation zoning. The results show that traditional villages form a strong southern Anhui core (83.01%), whereas the officially attributed locations of listed ICH items are more widely distributed across southern, central, and northern Anhui (43.21%, 26.42%, and 30.36%). The provincial centroid mismatch distance reaches 160.15 km, and prefecture-level cities are classified into ICH-advantaged, traditional-village-advantaged, and relatively matched types. Huangshan further demonstrates that positional proximity does not necessarily imply quantity-structure matching. Mechanism analysis suggests two scale-dependent association patterns: an environmental preservation pattern for traditional villages and a social-transmission and institutional-attribution pattern for listed ICH items. Based on this provincial-scale diagnosis, the study delineates key, secondary, and general conservation zones as strategy-oriented diagnostic zones and proposes differentiated collaborative conservation strategy orientations.