Analyzing Transregional Vernacular Cultural Landscape Security Patterns with a Nature–Culture Lens: A Case Study of the Yangtze River Delta Demonstration Area, China

Cultural landscape security is important to national spatial and cultural security. However, compared with the many achievements in the study of ecological security, transregional cultural landscape security research lacks enough attention to match its importance. In the context of advocacy of ‘connecting practices’ between nature and culture in the field of international heritage conservation, this paper developed an approach for constructing transregional vernacular cultural landscape security patterns and identifying the key protected areas. A method is put forward based on the case of the Yangtze River Delta Demonstration Area, one of the fastest urbanizing regions in China, and included the following three steps: (1) analyze the core values of the transregional vernacular cultural landscape from a long-time series and multi-scale perspective; (2) integrate ecological security assessment and value security evaluation by combining qualitative with quantitative methods; (3) build a comprehensive vernacular cultural landscape security pattern to identify key protected areas and develop a zoning and grading conservation strategy toolkit. The results proved that our new method could effectively build a cross-regional network of integrated spatial and functional relationships between the historical cultural and natural landscape and have great significance in improving the level of transregional territorial spatial governance.