Balancing Multiple Protected Objects and Management Costs in National Park Planning: A Case Study of Nanshan in China

To improve the performance of the existing protected areas, China proposed to establish a national park system. We developed a novel methodology of national park boundary delineation by quantitatively assessing the importance of multiple protected objects and the management costs. Taking the Nanshan National Park candidate area as a case study, we revealed how the spatial distribution of species, ecosystem services, and natural landscapes, together with the approaches to setting conservation targets, influence the area of planning solutions. The findings show that under identical level of conservation targets, planning solutions achieving species or natural landscape targets failed to simultaneously meet ecosystem service targets, indicating that the spatial differentiation existed among species, ecosystem services, and natural landscapes. We found that solely pursuing the maximization of a single protected object may result in planning solutions that fail to adequately meet the needs of other protected objects. Compared with the pilot area, in the identified priority areas, the protected species habitats increased by 89.0% and 2.3 times, the key areas of regulating ecosystem services increased by 1.6 and 2.7 times, and the area of tourist attractions increased by 2.9 and 3.0 times, with 18.0% and 40.2% increase in management costs per unit area. It is recommended that during national park planning and optimization, quantitative evaluation on the importance of various protected objects and the availability of land and funding should be conducted to inform the setting of conservation targets.