No abstract

PurposeThe development of tourism around Wolong Nature Reserve changes the local communities' ways of life. This study discusses how ecotourism affects the households' use of their capitals, the livelihood strategies as well as illustrates the impact on the habitats in the reserve through Department for International Development’s (DFID) Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) with data collected during fieldwork.Design/methodology/approachThe study focuses on (1) Calculating Livelihood Capital Index. (2) The effects of livelihood capitals on livelihood strategy were calculated by multinomial logistic regression.FindingsThe study has yielded the following results: (1) In general, tourism promotes people's livelihood capitals. The growth in different types of households under tourism settings is ranked as full-time tourism operators > part-time tourism operators > traditional living households. (2) Tourism development mainly shifts livelihood strategies in two ways. Firstly, travel operating replaces some traditional practices that make livings; secondly, increased needs for potherbs and herbs from tourists let households enter into the hills to pick the plants more actively, which intensifies the destruction of giant panda's habitats. (3) Nine types of livelihood capitals indicators, namely farmland quality, distance between house and roads, number of laborers, average housing area, average income per person, whether family members being village cadres, and ever having received skills training shape livelihood strategies in different levels.Originality/valueThree discussions are drawn from the study: (1) Enhancing the exploit for tourism resources to form a diversified competition. (2) Introducing herb growing to fulfill tourists' needs and improve people's livelihood in the meantime. (3) Optimizing the tourism surveillance and management system and improving the rules and regulations.

By 2050, 70% of the human population is likely to be living in cities, making urbanization an increasing global trend. Detecting changes in ecosystem services (ES) and their bundles in response to urbanization is critical for evaluating land-use policies. We examined changes in the provision of grains, vegetables, fruits, carbon sequestration, soil retention, sandstorm prevention, and water retention from 2000 to 2010 in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei metropolitan area, China; then, using a k-means cluster analysis, we classified 202 counties of this area into groups (bundles) based on their similar sets of ES. We found that (1) urban area, forestland, and grassland increased by 22%, 3.6%, and 1.7%, respectively, while cropland decreased by 4.6%; (2) the provision of grains, vegetables, and fruits increased by 24–90%, despite an overall loss in cropland; carbon storage and sand retention increased by 40% and 7%, respectively, while soil and water retention increased slightly by approx. 1% each; (3) 72 counties changed their ES bundles; and the “agriculture bundle” dominated the landscape in 2000 while it decreased by 50% in 2010 and was mainly transformed to “sub-developed urban bundle”, indicating loss of cropland during that decade. The transformation of ES bundles can be used to understand the effects of urbanization. The study indicated that improved technologies and ecological restoration in rural areas can help sustain multiple ES in our rapidly urbanizing world.