Spatial Relationship And Distribution Pattern Of National Nature Reserves And Other Main Protected Areas In China

The concepts of nature reserve have broad sense and narrow sense. The broad concept of nature reserve is widely acknowledged as protected area:"A clearly defined geographical space, recognised, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values committed to biological diversity, the protection of the natural and associated cultural resources, and maintain, and through legislation or other effective means for management of land and sea" (IUCN,1994). The narrow concept of nature reserve refers to some places in land, fresh water or sea water having representative natural ecosystem, natural concentrated distribution area of rare and endangered species of wild fauna and flora species, and special significant natural monument, which is recongnised by law and is given special protection and management (Terms of nature reserve in China,2007). According to above definition, in addition to the nature reserves of narrow sense, the generalized nature reserve mainly include scenic area, geological park, forest park, wetland park, and other forms of the original habitat conservation.After nearly 60 years of development, China’s nature reserve system has formed a considerable scale and has made gratifying achievements, but at the same time, we also find that the development of all natural protected area is independently, fragmented and unsustainable which needs to change. Firstly, the main problems are repetitive construction and investments, the different departments established protected form by themselves, lacking planning and coordination, which cause the boundaries of protection categories overlapped and unclear. The repeat construction of nature reserves in China wasted the limited fund, human and other resources for natural protection. Secondly this caused the imbalance development of China’s natural reserves. This imbalance is mainly manifested in large proportion of the forestry system nature reserves, the uneven distribution (the reserve coverage rate of high density population region is low), and the area ratio of national reserve is too large. There are still gaps in our nature reserve establishment, many species and important biological geographical units are facing serious threat. We have established 1900 national nature reserves, but there are still many key ecosystems and important species not covered and got good protection.Therefore, layout disorder, lack of macro coordination mechanism, no effective management is the causes of wasted effort and low efficiency of Nature Reserves in China. In order to fundamentally change the pattern of weak natural protection in China, the highest priority is to solve the macro layout and regulation of nature reserves.Based on above problems, we selected 5 main protected areas in China, using GIS spatial analysis method, combining with population density, urban development index and social economic indicators data, analyzed the spatial distribution characteristics and relationship between them.. The following results were obtained:(1) The distribution pattern of five kinds of natural protection forms in China is dense in East, sparse in West. According to the number of distribution, five main protected areas of are relatively concentrated in densely populated areas of middle and east China, and it’s relatively rare in West; for the space distribution characteristics, scenic areas, geological parks and forest parks are concentrated in east China, central south area, having high density in East, low density in West; but the spatial distribution of the nature reserves and wetland park is balanced in East and West China.(2) The number distribution of China’s five main protected areas is consistent with "Heihe-Tengchong population distribution line", that means more protection sites are in the area of population density; And on the space distribution, nature reserve is not consistent with "Heihe-Tengchong population distribution line", the geographical distribution of national nature reserve is mostly in the low population density region, but the rest of the four kinds of natural protected areas of are distributed mainly in population density area.(3) By the analysis of city distribution density index, the results shows China’s five main protected areas have consistency with the distribution of cities, and more protected areas are concentrated in urban area. It is because in recent years our country attaches great importance to the development of ecological tourism resources in protected areas.(4) After China’s biodiversity hotspots and ecosystem key regional distribution and species distribution were analyzed, the results showed forest parks, wetland parks, national parks and geological parks help nature reserves to alleviate the pressure of natural resources protection, and enrich the forms of protected area in China. Without considering the problem of management effectiveness, there is space complementary between the five kinds of protected areas, so they effectively made up for some conservation gaps. But there is still a vacancy in the overall coverage of protected areas, for example the main conservation gap are mainly distributed in Tibet, Qinghai, and seas near Taiwan, and Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, Guangxi, Xinjiang, Northeast, Inner Mongolia, also has a few key areas not covered by any type of protected areas.In conclusion, the five main protected areas in China have overlapping problems on space layout, and also formed the good complementary relationship, which is the foundation of unified planning and management.