A Study On The Categories Of Chinese Nature Reserves

It has been more than 100 years since the first protected area was set up across the globe. In2003, the sites of the planet have amounted to over 102,102, well, the sites of China (the sites of Hongkong, Macao, and Taiwan province are excluded, the same as followed), which covers 14.37% of the land surface of the nation, have already reached over 1,999. But, the name of protected areas is unbelievable diversity and up to several hundreds. So, it is important to merge the colourful terms of protected area into several definitely names. Today, the IUCN protected area management categories (IUCN, 1994) has been accepted and applied worldwide. In 1994, the Chinese National Standard of the principal of categories and ranks was taken action. However, it is quite different from the IUCN categories and linked hardly with the management-oriented issues of protected areas. As the rapid growth of nature reserves in China, the principal of categories is taken into considerations again for narrowing the gap between home and abroad.In this paper, Chinese nature reserves which natural background have been surveyed thoroughly are selected as sample for statistics analysis. Based on sample's attributions, nature reserves of sample are classified by using cluster analysis; on the other hand, the linear discriminant function of nature reserves is set up to assess a nature reserve confined to a category. The major conclusions are as the following:(1) In this paper, 114 sites are extracted from the population of Chinese nature reserves as sample. According to the statistical characters of China Nature Reserve List, nonparametric hypothesis test and variance analysis between sample and population shows that there is no significant difference between them at the 0.05 significant level. Correlation analysis indicates there is a significant correlationship between sample and population at the 0.05 significant level, too. All these show that sample and population have the common characteristics, so sample can be taken as a good representative of population. However, from the point of nature reserves history view, nonparametric hypothesis test and variance analysis show that there is a significant difference in either sites or range at the 0.01 significant level, but from the point of correlation analysis view, they show significant correlation at the same significant level.(2) Normal test for the goodness of fit of sample variables states that sample data fail to fit multivariate normal distribution, correlation analysis also shows some variables of sample have significant correlationship at 0.01 level. So data transform should be taken action by principal component analysis.