Abstract:

Eco-tourism in Mt. Jade Dragon heated up these years, which had an impact on the environment and vegetation resources in the region. Understanding the ecosystem degradation under disturbance is vital to policy making for ecological protection and sustainable development. In order to clarify the anthropic influence on the alpine meadow ecosystem, the typical alpine meadow area in Mt. Jade Dragon was selected as the study area; with field investigation and sampling during 2012-2016, we analyzed the degradation pattern of alpine meadow, and confirmed grazing and tourism as the key drivers for meadow degradation. The disturbance model was built to quantize disturbance intensity, and variation partitioning was used to determine the contribution of grazing and tourism to meadow degradation in the study area. The results showed that: (1) Half of the study area was disturbed by yak grazing and 70% area by tourism, and the grazing center mainly concentrated near livestock drinking points, while tourist noised around Viewing Deck and the Temple. We found that grazing and tourist activities matched with the trail system, the trail layout and tourists behavior mode account for the disturbance pattern. (2) Meadow degraded with the increase of disturbance intensity, the severe meadow degradation region overlapped with the highest disturbance intensity area. (3) Although there are grazing center area and tourist focus area, tourism, instead of grazing, has become the main disturbance driver in the study area. On the whole, tourism contributed more to the meadow degradation, and the future will remain so. Therefore, to reduce the impact of tourism on alpine meadows in Mt. Jade Dragon, informal trails of high frequency use can be fixed to formal artificial trail, vegetation and soil along the low usage informal trails can be recovered or regenerated.

Key words: alpine meadow, disturbance quantization model, variation partitioning, trail, Mt. Jade Dragon