Selection of National Park Candidate Areas Based on Spatial Overlap Characteristics of Protected Areas in China

The integration and optimization of protected areas is an important part of the construction of a protected areas system centered around national parks. How to best integrate and optimize protected areas is the most urgent problem in the reform. This paper analyzes the spatial overlap and continuity of protected areas in China on a national scale and proposes a collection of candidate areas for national parks. The results show that ➀ 52.9% of the protected areas overlap, with nature reserves, forest parks and scenic areas showing the most overlap, and the maximum number of overlaps is five. ➁ There are 1145 groups of contiguous protected areas that form continuous boundary areas, accounting for 58.9% of the total number of protected areas analyzed in this paper. Of these continuous zones, 48.55% consists of only two protected areas. There are 51 continuous areas with more than 10 protected areas, showing point continuous and/or patchy continuous boundary characteristics. ➂ According to the identified continuous areas, overlapping degree, protection levels and function, the candidate areas of national parks in China are proposed. Continuous areas with comprehensive ecosystem services, high-intensity protection levels, and high overlap intensity are selected as preliminary candidate areas for national parks. These are further refined based on their co-location with four types of key areas. A total of 41 areas are recommended as potential national parks. These continuous areas are highly consistent with the national “two screens, three belts” strategy, and nine of them are essentially consistent with the current national parks pilot. These results indicate that the recommended areas selected according to this research method are reasonable, and can provide a scientific basis for determining the spatial layout of China’s new protected areas system and the establishment of national parks