A Study Of Wildlife Conservation Attitudes Of Residents Living Adjacent To Nature Reserves

Wildlife Conservation has been an important part of natural resources Conservation all the time, the main approach of wildlife conservation is to establish nature reserves. Such measures of dividing conservation area to protect wildlife resources compulsorily in fact ignored the local needs for nature resource in the surroundings, which formed the conflict between nature reserve and local residents, is not conductive to conservation. Moreover, damage caused by wildlife happens from time to time, to which residents have no effective measures to compensate for the economic losses caused by wildlife, thus attitudes towards wildlife turn even more negative. Most scholars have realized that to make the nature reserve management and wildlife conservation smooth, taking the development of the local community into account is an important job. And to joint development of nature reserve and local communities, understanding and investigation of the conservation attitudes of local residents is particularly important. Besides, the investigation of factors that influence the residents’ conservation attitudes is also particularly important because it helps to understand why the residents formed such a conservation attitudes, it is helpful to guide the future direction of practice to improve the residents’conservation attitudes. In this paper, portions of Nature Reserve in Sichuan province were selected to investigate the residents’attitude towards wildlife conservation.546questionnaires involve a number of indicators such as Resident’s Attitude towards Nature reserve, wildlife, participation to conservation, and record socio-demographic factors like age, gender, ethnicity and other factors that may have influences such as distance from reserve, household arable land, household income. The results suggest that residents adjacent to nature reserve generally possess a positive wildlife conservation attitude.Part of the conservation area with distribution of minorities is slightly inconsistent of conservation, residents live close to wildlife area or residents with higher proportion of agricultural income possess a negative attitude of conservation. In many socio-demographic factors, gender, age, ethnicity, education level, household arable land, annual household income, distance from nature reserve are all influencing factors to residents’ conservation attitude. The differences between different energy forms of conservation attitudes are more significant. In the group where people take non-firewood as energy, people’s attitude varies with different gender, age, educational level, family size, the number of labor, arable land and annual income; In the group where people take firewood as energy, attitude varies with different gender ethnicn distance from nature reserve, but not variable with other factors. Residents’ income approaches are significant different in different nature reserves, factors influencing income are also significantly different. Through this investigation, several recommendations were provided such as offering more opportunity to let the local resident participate in conservation directly, letting more minorities participate in conservation and help Locals developing economics over a long period of time. This would be helpful to understand why such conservation attitude was formed. which orients the direction of improving local residents’attitude.