Exploring how natural, cultural and agricultural characteristics influence tourists' sustainable participation in green agricultural tourism

With the acceleration of global urbanization and agricultural transformation, traditional agricultural tourism has fallen into a development dilemma due to ecological overload and cultural homogenization. However, by integrating sustainable production practice and tourism experience, green agricultural tourism has become the critical path to balance ecological protection and economic development. Based on the empirical analysis of green agricultural tourism areas in China, this study adopts structural equation model and finds that: (1) Natural characteristics and cultural characteristics significantly promote tourists' participation behavior, while the direct influence of agricultural characteristics is insignificant, but play a crucial role in participation through the mediating effect of perceived green value and perceived experience value. (2) The driving intensity of perceived experience value on behavior is significantly higher than that of perceived green value, highlighting the dominance of experience economy in green agritourism. (3) Environmental awareness prominently regulates the impact of three characteristics on perceived green value. Tourists with high environmental awareness are more inclined to interpret natural landscapes, cultural symbols and green agricultural products as the results of sustainable practices, thus enhancing green value recognition. (4) Participation convenience highly regulates the influence of the three characteristics on the perceived experience value. Higher transportation convenience and information availability effectively reduce the threshold of tourism experience and amplify tourists' value perception of natural landscape, cultural interaction and agricultural product experience. The mechanism of "tourism-ecology linkage" and the optimization strategy of digital platform are eventually proposed to enhance visitors' engagement.