Assessing the spatial pattern of wilderness in central Yunnan: a case study from Chuxiong county, Yunnan

Abstract

Abstract Wilderness plays a key role in mankind’s response to combat climate change and slow down the rapid loss of biodiversity. Wilderness protection is the basis and key to preserving biodiversity, and wilderness identification is the basis for wilderness protection. This paper identified the wilderness areas (WAs) and analyzed the spatial pattern of wilderness level using the data of terrain, vegetation types, land use types, roads, and night lights, and classified the wilderness level into levels 1 to 10, with level 1 indicating the highest level of wilderness and level 10 indicating the lowest. Only patches characterized by wilderness level 1 and a patch area of ≧1.0km2 are identified as wilderness areas in this study. The results showed that (1) the low wilderness (level 8-10), middle wilderness (level 4-7), and high wilderness levels (level 1-3) in the region were in mosaic distribution, which accounted for 52.98%, 14.81%, and 32.21% of the region land area, respectively. Low wilderness areas were mainly distributed in the eastern part of the region, the middle wilderness areas were in the west part of the region, and the high wilderness areas were mainly distributed in the southwest and southeast of the region. (2) The wildness areas accounted for 12.74% of the total land area of the region with presenting scattered distribution. Moreover, wildness area which exceeded 10% of the total wilderness area had 5 towns such as Lucheng, Ziwu, and Xincun, Xishelu, and Dadi, and the range of wilderness covered 7 vegetation types, of which 97.46% of the wilderness areas was in pure forests, with 55.2% of the wilderness distributed in the range of 1800-2200 m. (3) The wilderness areas in the region were almost unprotected. The number and area of wilderness patches that were covered by nature reserves only accounted for 13.24% and 13.19% of patch numbers and areas of the total wilderness. Consequently, this might make it difficult to achieve animal and plant migration and gene exchange between different wildness patches, and it was also difficult to implement effective protection measures.