The Impacts Of Tourism Development To Nature Reserves On Diversity Of Plants Dispersed By Different Vectors

As a type of interference, tourism developments have considerably changed many landscapes of the world, resulting in a large number of ecological and environmental issues, threatening to biodiversity. The impacts of tourism developments on biodiversity are usually resulted from edge-effects. In order to further investigate this edge-effect, the paper analyzed and discussed the characters of tourism landscape ecosystem in aspects of spatial constructions and functions based on the theory of landscape ecology, and then test the disturbance mechanisms of tourism activities to biodiversity of plants dispersed by various vectors by establishing research hypothesis based on plant seed-dispersal and plant individual emotion ecology framework.The study was conducted in Khanka Nature Reserve from2006to2012, and two recreation landscapes exerted different disturbance intensity were selected within a lakefront forest. Across experimental years, all vascular plants recorded were divided into animal-dispersed species and wind-dispersed species. The purpose was to present the impacts of tourism development on plant motion ecology by monitoring the dynamics of plant diversity at spatial and temporal scales. To further test the disturbance mechanisms of tourism activities to animal-dispersed species, the experiments were also conducted on pollination and seed dispersal. The results showed that:(1) Across6years, animal-dispersed species and wind-dispersed species in the two experimental landscapes presented considerably different edge-effects:animal-dispersed species decreased across distances in both HDRP and LDRP, while wind-dispersed species all increased in the two landscapes. HDRP showed clear edge-effects while LDRP showed clear connectivity-effects in species richness. The dynamics of these two groups led to the changes of total diversity in the two landscapes.(2) Recreation ecotone was significantly lower than non-recreational zone in species richness of pollinators, visiting frequency and time; visitor disturbances mainly led to the reduction of visiting time; Landscape fragmentation and tourist disturbances might jointly led to the reductions in species richness and visiting frequency of pollinators;(3) Tourism activities (visitors and traffic disturbances) affected the behaviors of frugivorous birds, leading to the reductions of recruits. This might also be attributed to two mechanisms: tourism disturbances and landscape isolation. In addition, some fruits fell under mother plant canopy might be killed by toxicity of mother plants or competition between individuals, and thus decreased the numbers of recruits;(4) Visitor activities did not considerably affect the distributions of seedlings, but traffic disturbances exerted significant effects on it.The results indicate that, tourism development can exert different effects on plants dispersed by different vectors, which may be attributed to two mechanisms:the disruptions of both landscape modification and visitor’s activities to the mutualisms of animal-plant. This demonstrates that tourism development can take ripple effects on plants by affecting some animals. The Halo disturbance from patch-edges may considerably threaten to the species dispersed by animals. The study provides new insight into tourism disturbances.