Regulating Land Use Pattern Toward Participatory Watershed Management In Mountainous Areas

Watershed management is one of the most efficient ways for soil and water conservation in China. Towards sustainable watershed management is the trend and thus being sought by different communities in the world. Participatory watershed management has been recognized as a new and fundamental management model that can promote sustainable watershed management. It is also known that sustainable land use management is a sound basis for reaching sustainable watershed management. Taking above backgrounds into considerations, the thesis made a research on study of regulation of land use pattern in a mountainous watershed of southern China. For regulation, combined theories and methods were applied, particularly participatory approaches with GIS, landscape ecology and etc. This technical "top-down" and "bottom-up" approach also aims to find an innovative method to tackle with the weaknesses for both conventional and participatory watershed management models.The whole regulation process is classified into three typical phases, i.e.â‘  participatory diagnosis, not only for getting enough information but also getting local villagers involved in the whole regulation process; â‘¡ participatory land suitability analysis, conducting evaluation on land use objective, land use system, etc. together with local villagers; â‘¢ participatory decision-making, local villagers' direct involvement in assessing and choosing different land use scenarios. The study results are concluded as follows.1. Participatory approach is a very efficient method to get needed information but more significant is to promote local villagers in the watershed to participate in the whole process in an active manner. What important is that the applied participatory approach, including methods and tools, need to be established as a rule within a context framework from the very beginning. During the whole regulating process,...