Study On Forest Health And Traditional Forest Culture In Nabanhe Nature Reserve

Forest ecosystem is one of the most important ecosystems on land and its re-lationship with human beings is exactly close. Forest ecosystem provides not only the material basis for human survival and development, but also the source of human civilization progress. Under the situation of the rapid economic growth combined with the ecological environmental damage, individuals are paying more attention on cultural services provided by forests instead of their direct supply. Moreover, they gradually realize that the value of the cultural services is more worthy than the direct economic value of material products.Currently, the researches on cultural functions provided by forest ecosystem mainly focus on employment opportunities, forest tourism, science education and historical value. However, most researches ignore the cultural values with people for forest due to the result of natural conditions combined with human conditions, especially those who live in the indigenous or local communities heavily rely on forest resources for their livelihoods. Those people created traditional forest cul-ture during the process of harmonious coexistence with forest. It is very essential for sustainable development of local forest resources. Therefore, study on tradi-tional forest knowledge is theoretically and realistically meaningful.In this context, based on the definition of traditional forest culture and expert system, my dissertation summarized the culture of traditional forest classification system that includes religion, ecological ethnics, traditional festivals, traditional ritual activities, customary law (local rules or regulations), literatures (art, hand-made), food culture, traditional medical knowledge and other forest resources management technique with the "Millennium Ecosystem Assessment", "Chinese forestry standards" and "Technology regulations of classification, survey and cat-aloging for traditional knowledge associated biodiversity (Trial)" released by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP).This dissertation takes Nabanhe River nature reserve as the survey region. And traditional forest culture of Xishuangbanna was picked as a case to study the impact and change of traditional forest cultural awareness for forest health. Meanwhile, the dissertation gives quantitative research and analysis model for traditional forest knowledge from the ethnic ecological perspective. The crossed-disciplinary research method is the basic method in the research. The re-sults would be beneficial to traditional forest-related culture research integration into the system of forest ecological assessment system in future.Based on all of above mentioned innovative points, the conclusions and re-sults are shown as following:1. Based on the data of forest resource class Ⅱ survey of Nabanhe nature re-serve, combined with field survey and the assessment of the forest health by method of sub-compartment scale, a system of 3 criteria hierarchy that including 7 criterions was constructed. We concluded that the forest health in Nabanhe wa-tershed is sub-healthy as a whole and yet is inclined to medium health, which means low stability and being susceptible by human disturbance. The forest re- source is mainly classified into pure forest, mixed forest and economic forest, among which the pure and economic stand account for higher percentage than mixed stand while the later obviously is growing much healthier than the former, which results from unceasing deforesting (collective forest, watershed forest and Feng-shui forest) and land expansion for meeting the need to increase the income of local people.2. Based on the three research samples of residences, local households, citi-zens and tourists, it is found that the acknowledgement level on traditional forest knowledge decreases from local households to citizens to tourists. Thus, it sug-gests that the acknowledgement level goes down as the distance between the res-idences and forest goes up.3. Compared with the sample of local households with that of citizens, we found the prominent factor was accounted to age. In this case, age positively af-fects the acknowledgement. Meanwhile, the cultural type closely associated with life or interest is in high level of acknowledgement, such as food culture. This demonstrates that the closer the relationship between the culture and life, the higher chance to get developed rather than get lost; comparatively, the culture which has nothing to do with life would be diluted by the time eventually.4. Used qualitative research method with the in-depth interview of 81 local experts on traditional forest knowledge, it can be concluded that the traditional forest knowledge goes with down trend as time goes by different time periods (before 1970s, 1980s-2000s and present) after data analysis. Yet the reasons of coming down differ within the three periods, it was highly related to the policy conducted by the state before 1970s; while after the 1980s, with the drastic in-crease of population and continuous invasion of external culture, the economy ra-ther than culture was emphasized. And plus the encouragement from local gov-ernment, the commercial trees (mainly rubber) replace forest resource rapidly. As the enhancement of living and development of marketing, the direct usage of for-est resource decreased and thus the followed culture declined by the change of living methods.5. Take the Mandian Village as a case study to illustrate that the relationship between health status of forest resources and traditional forest culture. As a result, it is the same trend changing between health level of forest resources and tradi-tional forest knowledge in Mandian. And it is found that they are the reason and phenomenon of each other, based on the analysis of the reason to change. It means that the more health of forest resources can rich the traditional forest knowledge, meanwhile, the traditional forest knowledge promotes the mainte-nance and conservation of forest resources. Instead, unhealthy forest resources will lead to the decline of traditional forest knowledge, the decline of traditional forest knowledge will intensify the unhealthy status of forest resources.6. Based on the CVM, the traditional forest culture in Xishuangbanna is evaluated. By using the population base and tourist person-time, the gross pay-ment value of local people (households and citizens) is considered as the interior value of forest culture and the gross payment value of tourist is calculated as exte- rior value. As the result, the gross value of traditional forest knowledge in Xishuangbanna is ￥665,745,800 in the year of 2014.The research on traditional forest knowledge is a complicated and absurd is-sue and also is a brand new field. To some extent, this dissertation can partly bring a chance to open new page. However, the lack of relative research and theory with scientific criteria, there are still some imperfections in my research. But the main purpose of the dissertation focuses on attracting more attentions from other ex-perts and scholars, and incorporation of traditional forest knowledge into the evaluation system of forest ecosystem.What’s more, based on the summarize review of the dissertation, we can find the health status of forest resources, the acknowledgement of traditional forest and the culture of traditional forest coexist with close intrinsic connection. As a result, the further research is necessary with improved techniques and methods of forest ecosystem assessment.