A Case Study On Biodiversity Conservation Corridor Design In Xishuangbanna

With the increasing population and rapid economic development, human activities have great impact on the biodiversity either inside or outside nature reserves. In order to enhance the ecological connectivity between nature reserves, conservsation activities began to adopt the concept of biodiversity conservation corridors. Although, there is much discussion on biodiversity conservation corridors all over the world, yet few cases were reported due to lacking of appropriate methodologies for the design of such corridors.With the support of the Asian Development Bank, a biodiversity conservation corridor initiative (BCI) has been implemented in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), one of the pilot sites is located in Xisuangbanna. This study intends to explore the methodologies for the design of biodiversigty conservation corridors through case studies. The techniques of Geographical Information Systems are applied to analyze the changes of land use and the processes of landscape fragmentation over the past twenty years in the case study area. The result indicates that the forest and dry land have been modified dramatically. The area of forest decreased 40.3%, and dry land increased 81.6%. At the same periuod, the area of tea plantation increased rapidly in recent years, due to market demand. The landscape becomes more fragmented, and the connectivity in the forest becomes lower.Three different methods are applied to design the corridor, and respective scenarios are compared. The results show that Scenario ONE, which is designed on the basis of integrating dominant factors, has the largest corridor size in terms of land area, it will affect too many farm lands, and too many people, it will be difficult and costly to establish and manage corridors; for Scenario TWO, which is designed based on the habitat selection of the conservation object, consists of the habitat for the particular conservation object, and less farm lands are involved, but this corridor is narrow and may not be sufficient for biodiversity conservation purpose. Based on cost-distance analysis, the Scenario THREE is proposed. This scenario presents an appropriate corridor size with large portion of forest cover. Based on comparison, Scenario Three is recommended.In addition to the above, some suggestions are provided for the actual implementation of biodiversity conservation corridors.