THE WORLD CONFERENCE ON ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION

14 Plenary Sessions
Ecosystem Degradation and Restoration in the Western
China
Bojie FU, Guohua LIU, Yihe LU
Key Lab. Of Systems Ecology, Research Centre for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, P. O. Box2871, Beijing, 100085, China
Western China covers 12 provinces with an area of about 6600 thousand
squire kilometers accounting for about 68.8.3% territory of the whole country.
The geomorphology patterns are unique constituting high mountains and deep
river valleys, plateaus, and large basins. It can be divided into zones from middle
temperate zone to peripheral tropical zone according to the latitudinal temperature
gradient with additional two vertical zones of plateau temperate and
sub-frigid zones. According to the humidity conditions, it varies from extreme
arid to humid regions. Therefore, the natural ecosystem types are diverse
along horizontal and vertical gradients. The latitudinal pattern of ecosystems
from the south to north is tropical rain forest, sub-tropical evergreen broadleaf
forest, temperate grassland, and temperate desert. Along the longitudinal
direction from the east to west, there is temperate forest, temperate grassland,
desert grassland, and desert. Arid valley shrub land, evergreen broad-leaf forest,
deciduous broad-leaf forest, sub-alpine coniferous forest, sub-alpine
shrub, sub-alpine grassland, sub-alpine meadow, and alpine sparse vegetated
ecosystem distribute vertically along the elevation gradient of high mountains.
There are 7 out of the 11 terrestrial biodiversity hotspots in western China.
However, owing to the impacts of global environmental change, local environmental
fragility, and high population and development pressures, many environmental
problems have emerged as soil and water loss, desertification, ecological
degradation of grasslands and forests, the shrinking of wetlands, soil
saltification and alkalinization, and the loss of biodiversity. The natural driving
factors of these problems are the extreme climatic conditions and the unique
geomorphological conditions. The human factors include the rapid increase of
population, the irrational reclamation of natural ecosystems, the uncontrolled
use of water resources, over grazing, over cutting, poor land management, the
unconsciousness of the environment, and the ignorance of the environmental
laws. It is an urgent need to restore the degraded ecosystems under the national
western development strategies. Multidisciplinary cooperation and
multi-stakeholder participation are indispensable for this restoration campaign.
The principles of the restoration include: 1) eco-regional and even site
specific and problem oriented restoration; 2) natural succession based restoration;
3) multi-objective and multi-measure restoration; 4) scientific and comprehensive
planning based restoration; and 5) participation driven restoration.
The success of the ecological restoration initiative in the western China depends
on the establishment of a rational ecosystem management framework,
which necessitate the enhancement of scientific research on the issues pertinent
to ecological restoration.