Land Use of the Li-Speaking People in a Mountainous Area of Hainan Island, China: Impact of National Nature Reserve Established in 1986
Practically, Landsat TM (30m) or SPOT (20m) have been used for estimating the type of crops or size of gardens in large scale, mostly, in industrialized agricultural areas. However, they could not usually provide detailed information for the indigenous food production system in rural communities where small patches of gardens were made by a household, without clear definition of the boundaries. Slush-and-burn gardens with the length and width of 30m, for example, is equivalent to one pixel on the Landsat Image. IKONOS was launched in 2000, which has provided a satellite image of 4m resolution in multi spectrum data. It has been expected to be utilized for the land use analysis at a community level, though such application has been rare so far. The primary purpose of the present study is to investigate the ability of IKONOS for land use/land cover analysis in a small village where the authors have conducted anthropological field works for six months in total and have collected the field information as well
as people’s recognition about the land use practices. The target village is located in Hainan Province of China.
Subject
The target village where the Li-speaking people inhabited is located in Wushisan city, Hainan Island of China. The entire Island of Hainan was established as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) when it became a Hainan Province in 1988. Since then, it is one of most rapidly developing areas in China. Large money has been invested to tourism development and cash cropping. Along the process, the people's food production system or lifestyles have been changed.
The Li-speaking people are one of minority groups and have inhabited the mountainous parts of the Island. Their indigenous subsistence consists of rice cultivation in the paddy field, shifting cultivation of rice, maize, and tubers in slush-and-burn gardens, hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants. They reared large number of buffaloes primarily for plowing paddy fields and also as bride price or compensation in case of troubles. To maintain the fodder grasses for the buffaloes, the people had conducted regular burning in their neighboring mountains. As a result, natural forests diminished around the target village and the areas were covered with grasses or bare soil by 1980s. In 1980s, however, the Chinese government started to establish a policy to conserve or recover the natural environment of the Island. In 1986, the national reserve was established covering Mount Wushisan (the highest peak in Hainan Island) and the surrounding parts. Eastern parts of the target village lay in this reserved area
were any burning or agricultural activities were put under the ban. In 1992, burning activities were prohibited even in the parts outside the national reserve.
Today, the past grasslands around the subject village are covered with secondary growth. The villagers claimed that grasslands have changed to secondary growth since 1986, because they stopped their burning activities. The shifting cultivation, hunting and gathering were also stopped. Instead, the government encouraged the people to plant cash crops (e.g. banana, tea, and medicinal plants) for increasing the income level of the villagers and the people did so.
