Delineating Priority Areas for Preservation and Restoration across Production–Living–Ecological Spaces in Ganzi, China

Delineating conservation priority areas for both preservation and restoration is essential for developing adaptive ecosystem management strategies across production–living–ecological spaces (PLES). This study developed a coherent framework with four steps: (1) mapping spatial distributions of biodiversity and ecosystem services, (2) ranking the relative importance of ecosystems across spaces, (3) delineating priority areas for preservation and restoration according to the human footprint and priority ranks, and (4) contrasting with current conservation networks and overlapping with PLES. This framework was applied in Ganzi, China, to delineate the preservation priority areas (PPAs) of 8714.2 km2 and 11,308.1 km2, and restoration priority areas (RPAs) of 36,817.7 km2 and 63,578.4 km2 under the target to conserve 30% and 50% of territories, respectively. The priority areas, including PPAs and RPAs, achieve higher conservation capacity than the current Ecological Conservation Redline (ECR) in terms of biodiversity conservation or ecosystem service delivery. Roughly 67% of PPAs, 40% of RPAs, and a total of 75% of large patches with high priority are covered by ECR, indicating the necessity to adjust boundary and conduct restoration for ECR. As for PLES, the conservation priority areas encompass proportionally more ecological space (67–76%) than ECR (63.5%) or Ganzi (61.4%), implying the lower potential conflict between local residents’ production and conservation, and meanwhile, new opportunities and challenges in sustainable development in human-dominated spaces. The coherent framework to delineate PPAs and RPAs is flexible in terms of threshold in human impact or ecological degradation and can be improved by considering the complex relationships between indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem services. This study highlights the importance of incorporating ecosystem features, land uses, and human activities in developing different strategies according to different conservation purposes in the context of sustainable development.