Abstract
Demographic and socioeconomic factors at the individual or household levels may have significant impacts the spatiotemporal dynamics of wildlife habitat and biodiversity. Based on field data and a spatial agent-based model that integrates cross-scale data and cross-discipline models in Wolong Nature Reserve (China) for giant panda conservation, we examine how panda habitat would respond to changes in a set of socioeconomic and demographic factors individually and collectively. The model simulates each family member’s life history events and the household agents’ interactions with each other and with the environment over a period of 30 years. Our simulations show that demographic or migration decisions and economic incentives (e.g., electricity subsidy) would have escalating effects over time on local human population size, household number, and ultimately panda habitat. Aside from practical purposes, this study provides a new approach to studying human-environment interactions from the perspectives of individual needs and decisions.
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There were 49 (9 males and 40 females) people who migrated into and 67 (9 males and 58 females) people who migrated out of the reserve due to factors such as social networks established by seasonal workers.
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Electrical outages had three levels: high, moderate, and low, representing more than 5, 2–4, and less than 2 outages per month, respectively. Voltage also had three levels, representing 220 V, 150–220 V, and fewer than 150 V (An et al. 2002). The default levels of outage and voltage for each household in the model were based on real data: values for a given household could be any of the three levels. If a specific household already has a low outage level, it would remain at that level regardless of the request of reducing outage level. Households with moderate or high levels of outage would have one level of reduction, resulting in low or moderate levels of outage, respectively.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Wolong Nature Reserve, especially Director Hemin Zhang for logistic assistance in field work and Jinyan Huang and Shiqiang Zhou for their assistance in data acquisition. We appreciate the valuable comments and edits from Richard Cincotta, Larry Gorenflo, and three anonymous reviewers. For financial support, we are indebted to the US National Science Foundation (NSF), US National Institutes of Health (NIH), American Association for Advancement of Sciences, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and National Natural Science Foundation of China.
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An, L., Linderman, M., He, G., Ouyang, Z., Liu, J. (2011). Long-Term Ecological Effects of Demographic and Socioeconomic Factors in Wolong Nature Reserve (China). In: Cincotta, R., Gorenflo, L. (eds) Human Population. Ecological Studies, vol 214. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16707-2_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16707-2_10
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