The Management Effectiveness In Mayanghe National Nature Reserve, Guizhou Province, China

Currently, the amount of global protected area is remarkably increasing following the improving public awareness on environment conservation. The improvement of management effectiveness was repeatedly emphasized by specialists on the field and was confirmed in Durban's World Park Congress in 2003 as one of the Ten Objectives expected to be achieved on Global Protected Area Development in next ten years.The quantity of established Nature Reserve was growing up during few decades. Nowadays, improving the quality of management on Chinese Nature Reserve is considered as new direction for its development. For achieving the goal, management weakness of Chinese Nature Reserve should be identified. Although Protected Area system and management process usually was highlighted by some international or national protected area management effectiveness assessing tools, the recognized weaknesses of protected area system still should be modified site by site for improving management quality of protected area eventually. So, developing a customized management effectiveness assessing tool for single nature reserve is necessary to clearly identify threats faced by protected target and focus on reducing effects from management weaknesses.For improving management quality on singlel Nature Reserve based on conservation biology and management, this research is raised as a nature reserve management effectiveness assessing tool based on theories of objective management, technical platform of Geographic Information System, field investigation of threats faced by protected target, and measurement on contribution towards protected target achieving.In this research, activities of nature reserve management are broke down as field protection, zoning, co-management, and monitoring & evaluation following some outputs from mainstreaming international e;~periences on protected area management. In terms of assessing field protection system, first step is identifying protected target and pointing out the controllable threats faced be protected target from Problem Tree Analysis; the second step is field investigation of threats about its detail such as when, where, who, why and how; the third, the detail of threats will be put in GIS system and lap over the location of protection activities for calculating the area and percentage of threats under protection control, and protected target effected by protection activities; then the management effectiveness can be measured by them. After that, this research goes further on the reasons leading to management weaknesses by analyzing staff capacity, motivation, and organizational support which result organization performance. At the end, some customized suggestions are figured out for improving management quality.For measuring zoning appropriateness, based on GIS this research compares location of different functional zones with location of protected target to calculate the percentage of protected target on zones. Through lapping over threats, protection activities with functional zones, the impacts of threats on protected target in different zone can be clarified which lead to the assessment of zoning appropriateness on the nature reserve.In order to measure the contribution of co-management to reach protection objective, firstly, the correlation analysis on income level of local communities and threats distribution should be done to verify the hypothesis in which the threat making will be costly if the income of local community is high; secondly, field survey is done to collect information about threats' running manner, location of benefit villages and their impacts on protection; thirdly, the correlation of benefit activities and protected target distribution will be figure out for assessing the co-management contribution towards protected objective achieving.For assessing monitoring system, monitoring indicators are assessed from its orientability, achievability, reliability and presentability towards presenting the dynamic changes of protected target, to confirm its contribution on management effectiveness. In terms of evaluation system, the efficiency of time and cost for information processing, impact of evaluated results on decision making, and time for implementing feedback actions were proposed to assess the contribution of Monitoring & Evaluation system on protection objective achievingThe utilization of the methodology in Mayanghe National Nature Reserve shows us:1. Francois Leaf Monkey and its habitat as Protection Objective of the Nature Reserve have 52.27% and 25.67% under periodic patrolling protection respectively; lack of capacity, inadequate participation on motivation mechanism formulation, insufficient supervisors for field patrolling, lack of infrastructure and equipment, high overhead and insufficient equity on patrolling institutional design were identified as management weaknesses for the Nature Reserve.2. There is lot of land no linkage with Francois Leaf Monkey's protection in Buffer Zone and Experimental Zone in Mayanghe National Nature Reserve. Some threats impacting Francois Leaf Monkey's Habitat is still active in Core Zone. Zoning area more than needed resulted dispersed management resources which should be concentrated on preserving protected target.3. Amount of people involved illegal resources using activities was negative correlation with per household's income level distribution among local communities. The location of Protection activities which can benefit local communities was lack of logical linkage with protection objective achieving. Only 27.3% Francois Leaf Monkey and 24% its habitat situated in the area of benefit village. The participatory co-management should be introduced in for reducing threats.4. No biodiversity monitoring activities based on regular patrolling for information collection runs in the Nature Reserve. Also, evaluation mechanism of protecting impact is absent.Generally, the assessed result of management effectiveness on Mayanghe National Nature Reserve is not good and still need to be improved. From the purpose of benchmarking, in this research a questionnaire transferred from Protected AreaManagement Effectiveness Tracking Tool was developed for information collection among different level of staff. The result show that the qualitative scale of management effectiveness in the Nature Reserve is 100.3 as 57.3% of its total. The assessment result is also as same as the research output.Innovations of this research include:1. Most of international mainstream protected area management effectiveness assessment is based on qualitative indicators which emphasize the assessment of management processes. Strengths of common methodologies are cost effective, strong guide on project cycle management while its weaknesses are difficult to position the threats faced by protected target and lead to unclear orientation on improving management quality. GIS system was combined in our research for positioning threats faced by protected target, and then guide to the design of management activities. The process will be able to clarify the output of management activities and lead to direct contribution on protected objective of Nature Reserve.2. Effectiveness analysis on management was used for analyzing efficiency of protection activities, which resulted to naturally, aimly relocate resources for formulating management improvement strategy.3. This methodology is customized for management effectiveness improvement in Nature Reserve. Its combination with daily work of Nature Reserve management will be able to benefit for checking the relationship between management activities with protection objectives. It will also be able to facilitate communication both in different level of management authorities and between stakeholders of Nature Reserve.