Wetland Restoration & Habitat Rehabilitation and Their Ecological Consequences on Habitats of Waterbirds

This research explored the landscape targets and ecological measures for wetland restoration and habitat rehabilitation in the pilot area in response to the wetland restoration and habitat rehabilitation in Zhangdu Lake jointly initiated by WWF and Hubei provincial government recently.The ecological consequences of wetland restoration and habitat rehabilitation on habitats of waterbirds were evaluated based on these landscape targets and ecological measures by employing wintering habitat of potential endangered waterbirds as indicators.The results shows that the habitat suitability and quantity of core or suitable habitats can be generally improved and increased a lot,especially the striking increment of core or high quality habitat has emerged in former degraded wetland habitats,where the core or suitable habitat were almost eliminated by human disturbance.In addition,the valid habitat suitability quality can also be greatly enhanced by mitigation of existing serious habitat fragmentation through different management such as restructuring the road system and reallocating the residential sites in some sensitive habitat area.This research indicates that,even without the large scale wetland restoration in Zhangdu Lake,the valid core and suitable habitat can still be largely enhanced by the habitat rehabilitation and the management to reconstruct the degraded habitat and to mitigate the adverse impacts of habitat fragmentation.From this research,it is proposed that habitat rehabilitation-oriented modes of wetland restoration can be advocated and magnified in human dominated areas,especially the wetlands in metropolitan area like Zhangdu,where the scale and the magnitude of wetland restoration are heavily restricted by the social economic context.