Li Wenjun, Ge Xiaodong, Liu Chunyan
College of Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, PR China.
Environ Monit Assess. 2005 Sep;108(1-3):279-93. doi: 10.1007/s10661-005-4327-0.
More and more visitors are attracted to protected areas nowadays, which not only bring about economic increase but also seriously adverse impacts on the ecological environment. In protected areas, trails are linkage between visitors and natural ecosystem, so they concentrate most of the adverse impacts caused by visitors. The trampling problems on the trails have been received attentions in the tremendous researches. However, few of them have correlated the environmental impacts to trail spatial patterns. In this project, the trails were selected as assessment objective, the trampling problems trail widening, multiple trail, and root exposure were taken as assessment indicators to assess ecological impacts in the case study area Jiuzhaigou Biosphere Reserve, and two spatial index, connectivity and circularity, were taken to indicate the trail network spatial patterns. The research results showed that the appearing frequency of the trampling problems had inverse correlation with the circularity and connectivity of the trail network, while the problem extent had no correlation with the spatial pattern. Comparing with the pristine trails, the artificial maintenance for the trails such as wooden trails and flagstone trails could prohibit vegetation root from exposure effectively. The research finds will be useful for the future trail design and tourism management.
如今，越来越多的游客被吸引到保护区，这不仅带来了经济增长，也对生态环境造成了严重的负面影响。在保护区内，步道是游客与自然生态系统之间的联系纽带，因此它们集中了游客造成的大部分负面影响。步道上的践踏问题在大量研究中受到了关注。然而，其中很少有研究将环境影响与步道空间模式联系起来。在本项目中，选取步道作为评估对象，将步道拓宽、多条步道和根系暴露等践踏问题作为评估指标，对九寨沟生物圈保护区案例研究区域的生态影响进行评估，并采用连通性和圆形性这两个空间指标来表征步道网络的空间模式。研究结果表明，践踏问题的出现频率与步道网络的圆形性和连通性呈负相关，而问题严重程度与空间模式无关。与原始步道相比，对木质步道和石板步道等步道进行人工维护可以有效防止植被根系暴露。研究结果将对未来的步道设计和旅游管理有所帮助。
