Abstract
Suichang County, Zhejiang Province, China, boasts a complex geographical setting and a long history, housing 25 national-level traditional villages with distinct spatial morphologies. However, previous studies have primarily focused on the impact of single factors (e.g., terrain) on village spatial morphology. Drawing on cultural ecology, this study selected 25 national traditional villages in the county as subjects and developed an indicator system encompassing 11 environmental, 4 cultural, and 10 spatial morphology indicators. Using methods including spatial design network analysis and Spearman correlation analysis, this study uncovered the mechanisms through which environmental and cultural factors influence the spatial morphology of traditional villages. The results indicate that environmental and cultural elements jointly shape traditional villages’ spatial morphology through distinct pathways. Terrain geomorphology constrains the regularity of architectural clusters and the complexity of alley networks. Climatic characteristics and hydrological conditions drive alley network connectivity and affect the coefficient of variation of direction. Population and transportation elements promote the expansion of traditional villages. The proximity of ancient roads is related to alley network connectivity and betweenness, while the ancestral hall centroid deviation affects the village’s morphological base. These findings provide technical support and planning guidance for the improved protection and utilization of similar traditional village heritage in southwestern Zhejiang.
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Data availability
Data are available in a public, open-access repository and can be freely downloaded from the official websites, as detailed in the “Data source” section. The datasets used and/or analyzed in the current study are not publicly available because this experiment was done collaboratively and the results belong to the team, but are available on demand from the corresponding author.
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Funding
The research was funded by Major Humanities and Social Sciences Research Projects in Zhejiang higher education institutions: Research on the Construction and Implementation Pathways of a Comprehensive Protection and Utilization System for Traditional Villages in the Yangtze River Delta Region in the New Era, Grant Number 2024GH062; Regular Research Project of the Zhejiang Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era: Study on the Zhejiang Model for the Construction of Characteristic Protected Areas of Traditional Villages from the Perspective of Chinese—style Modernization, Grant Number 25CCG20; Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of the Ministry of Education of China: Research on Construction Models, Evaluation Systems, and Implementation Pathways for Traditional Village Character Protection Zones, Grant Number 25YJAZH258; and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. Y23E080008.
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X.L.Z.: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, writing original draft and editing, funding acquisition; L.S.: software, formal analysis, data curation and validation, visualization, writing original draft; F.Y.L.: investigation, data curation and validation, writing review and editing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhao, X., Shi, L. & Liu, F. Cultural ecology perspective on mechanisms influencing the spatial morphology of traditional villages in Suichang County, China. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-36382-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-36382-9
