China’s land border areas have both important ecological barrier functions and tourism development potential. Under the dual requirements of protection and development, it is necessary to scientifically identify the spatial matching status of ecology and tourism in this area. This paper takes the land border provinces of China as the research area to construct an evaluation indicators system for ecological resilience and tourism economy. Empirical methods such as spatial mismatch index were adopted to analyze the spatio-temporal evolution characteristics and spatial mismatch relationship of the two from 2009 to 2019. This research finds that the spatial overlap of the two in the research area is relatively low. The spatial mismatch between the two has undergone a complete transformation from “leading in ecological resilience” to “leading in tourism economy”. The results show that in the current Chinese land border areas, the development of the tourism economy has outpaced ecological resilience. In the future, relevant policy measures should be formulated based on the effects of different influencing factors to coordinate ecological protection and tourism development in border areas and better serve the strategic needs of China’s ecological advancement and “dual carbon” goals.
Li et al. (2026) studied this question.