Identification Of Vegetation Key Protected Areas In Northwest Yunnan Based On MCDA

Global Biodiversity lossing is extremely serious in recent years. Establishing nature reserves is an effective way for biodiversity protection. However, nature resources degradation is one of big issue in China, especially in the Northwest of Yunnan. There is a big conflict between conservation and development. The rich biodiversity place has highly conservation value. The backward economy need more resources for local development. Land zoning is an important approach that can reduce conflict by partitioning the landscape into various land use units that are managed for different levels of human activity. The core of land zoning is the work of critical conservation area identification.Our research focus on the Three Parallel Rivers of the Yunnan Protected Area,, a World Heritage site. We present a systematic methodology that integrates a vegetation plots data with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) technique to build a zoning scheme for Northwest of Yunnan.Based on these data, the conservation value scores for24sub-vegetations in Northwest of Yunnan were given. Then we use the vegetation protection and economic development as two decision objective to make three planning scenarios to adapt to the different development strategies. We choose the optimal escenario of biodiversity conservation and economic development. The main results are listed as following:(1) The assessment indicator system of conservation value scores for24sub-vegetations were given:①species richness,②rarity of the vegetation,③No.of national endangered plants,④No.of provincial endangered plants,⑤ranking of endangered species,⑥habitat specificity.(2) we used four human active factors to simulate the pattern of protection cost:①altitude,②density of residential,③distance from roads,④distance from towns(3) we use four nature resources of economic development:①egetation resources,②water resource,③scenery resource,④mineral resources and three suitability factors:①distance from roads,②distance from towns,③slope to simulate the pattern of economic development suitability. (4) We present three planning schemes to adapt to the different development strategies and choose the composite development scheme of vegetation protection and economic development as the optimal scheme.(5) K-means cluster analysis was used to classify the research area into four zones. Zonel as the critical conservation area is15022km2, occupying22.62%lands of research area. The protect target of zonel is the subvegetation of monsoon evergreen broad leaved forest, clod-warm coniferous forests, alpine and sub-alpine meadow and snows cover; zone1as the most important conservation area where the important forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystem, wetlands ecosystem can be found.Zone2is20253km2and occupying30.50%of rearch area, it is the main area for the conservation of forest ecosystem,we suggest give it equal protection effort with zone1.Zone3is17225km2and occupying25.94%, the conservation value of zone3is low and we can use it as a buffer zone. Zone4with no conservation value, it is13905km2and occupying20.94%of research area, should be treated as the traditional land use area.(6) We make a contrastive analysis of existing nature reserves and the critical conservation area we presented and identified the gap area.