Establishing a national park category system in China
It is inevitable that administrative managements have become disordered and function-positioning improper since the categories of protected areas in China are abundant and with overlapping protected objectives.Therefore,straightening out the protected area category system is significant to coordinate relationships between protection and development.National parks are a branch under the protected area system that undertakes dual tasks in natural ecological resource protection and utilization.Based on a literature review,this article teases out the connotation and functions of national parks worldwide and states that national park under the IUCN protected area category system is a more complete and accurate generalization for global single national parks.The basic criteria of designating any protected area to be national park are concluded according to the definition of national parks under the IUCN protected area category system.The basic criteria should consist of area suitability,nature resource representative,degree of human influence and function comprehensiveness.We then use nature reserves in China as cases to filter candidates for national parks in China.First,a global ‘national park’ should be no less than 1 000hm2.Second,nature reserves at a national level in China have been designated to be Nationally Representative for unique nature resources and ecosystem.The degree of human influence in every national nature reserve is evaluated by virtue of human footprint index dataset which indicates a degree of human activities influence to every of 100hm2 terrestrial area.Therefore,a total of 55 nature reserves in China at national levels with areas not less than 1 000hm2 are finally determined to be candidate national parks.In the end,an approach of five ‘ nested’ categories of protected areas are proposed in order to meet the final criteria of functional comprehensiveness.
protected areanational park category systemnature reserveIUCN protected area category systemHuman footprint indexChina
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
