The Yangtze River Basin is one of the important economic zones in China, exploring the spatial and temporal distribution of ecotourism efficiency and identifying its optimization path are important for building the Yangtze River International Golden Tourism Belt with high quality. In this paper, we construct the "input-output" index system of ecotourism efficiency, measure the ecotourism efficiency of 11 provinces and municipalities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2011 to 2021 based on the Super-DEA model with non-expected outputs, and optimize the ecotourism efficiency of the 11 provinces and municipalities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt through the HP filtering analysis and the Hurst index, the future trend prediction, the Kernel density and the Hurst index. Future trend prediction, Kernel density estimation, convergence analysis and other methods are used to study the spatio-temporal evolution law of ecotourism efficiency, and with the help of fuzzy stereotyped set comparative analysis to explore the ecotourism efficiency grouping enhancement path of the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The results show that: (1) the ecotourism efficiency of the whole Yangtze River Economic Belt basin is maintained at a high level of development; the ecotourism efficiency is roughly divided into three stages of development, which are shown as keeping stable, decreasing and accelerating; the ecotourism efficiency of the downstream area is higher than that of the middle and upstream areas; the Shanghai Municipal Government and the Zhejiang Provincial Government basically realize the efficient development of ecotourism, and the ecotourism development of the Yunnan Provincial Government is the most lagging behind. (2) In terms of cyclical analysis and trend prediction, the ecotourism efficiency of the Yangtze River Economic Belt has a certain degree of cyclicality, with an average cycle of 4.3 years, and the 11 provinces all show a continuous development trend in the future, with Anhui, Hubei, and Hunan provinces showing a significant and continuous increase, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Chongqing, and Yunnan provinces showing a non-significant and continuous increase, and Shanghai and Guizhou provinces showing a non-significant and continuous decrease. (3) In terms of evolutionary patterns and spatial distribution, the ecotourism efficiency of the Yangtze River Economic Zone is steadily improving; the "high-high" agglomeration in the downstream area in the early stage of the study gradually develops into the "high-high" agglomeration in the whole basin; the ecotourism efficiency agglomeration is tested, the downstream region exhibits a significantly higher agglomeration rate compared to the middle and upper reaches. (4) In the comparative analysis of fuzzy stereotyped sets, four grouping paths of high ecotourism efficiency are proposed: population agglomeration under the open mode, population agglomeration under the modern livability under the open mode, eco-livability under the economic assistance, and population agglomeration under the domination of tourism.