Conservation Planning Of Biodiversity In The Three Rivers Headwater Region In Qinghai Province

Identifying biodiversity conservation priorities and rational function zoning in a region or in the whole world scale are the key issues for great successful and efficient biodiversity conservation. The broad land, the unique geographic location and environment, the rich biodiversity and its special pattern are all of great significance for national or world wide biodiversity conservation. Although large conservation areas had been built and they had contributed significantly to the ecology protection and construction project which had generate large ecology and social benifits, the nature reserves were not functioning well in the restriction of the immature planning ability. As for this phenomenon, we assessed the existing reserves and newly analysed the priorities in the study area and the functionzoning.Based on the biodiversity characteristics in Three Rivers Headstream Region and in the framework of systematic conservation planning, the irreplaceability values in conservation planning units were calculated using GIS and C-Plan conservation planning software. According to the irreplaceability, we analyzed the contributions of existing Three Rivers Headstream Nature Reserve and identified conservation priorities and gaps in the study area. The calculated irreplaceabvility values were combined with the human activity disturbance index to delineate the function zones by irreplaceability value range segmentation. Contribution of the new function zones and that of the original ones to biodiversity conservation was also compared.The main results of this research are as follow:1. Existing protected areas covering all the surrogates identified in the research and 52.50% of the surrogates had been protected to meet the conservation targets. The spatial distribution of high irreplaceability areas roughly correspond to core zones of existing nature reserves. The percent contributions of core zones, core zones + buffer zones, and core zones + buffer zones +experiment zones are 52.03%,64.01% and 85.14%, respectively. Core zones in six subareas of Three Rivers Sources Nature Reserve are highly complementary which indicates reasonable core zone identification and obvious type classification of main protected objects.2. GAP analysis indicated that 15.86% of the total targets were unfulfilled and 47.50% of the surrogates were underrepresented including 5 of ecosystem type and 14 species. The gaps are mainly distributed in Suojia—Tanggula region characterized by lakes, glaciers, snow mountains and alpine meadows, Qumalai, Maduo—Xinghai region with alpine meadows as main vegetation type, Zeku—Henan alpine shrub and meadow region, and Nangqian—Yushu forest and shrub region.3. The percentage contribution of the new function zones improved much more than that of the original ones even with no increase in the area of the zones. With the new function zones, the percentage contribution of the core zone, the core zone + buffer zone, and the entire three zones increased from 61.20% to 71.21%,77.57% to 92.45%, and 91.20% to 95.40%, respectively.4. In terms of protection status of the surrogates, both the new function zones and the original ones covered all the surrogates, but the new zones covered more surrogates than the original ones. Percentage of surrogates protected by the original core zone, core zone and buffer zone, and the entire three zones was 27.50%,47.50% and 80%, respectively. However, the corresponding percentage of surrogates protected by the new zones was 32.50%,77.50% and 87.50%, respectively.