As the flagship species of biodiversity protection, the giant panda has an umbrella protection function. China is committed to building a natural protection system with national parks as the main body to achieve sustainable development. In this paper, the sustainable livelihood analysis framework is used to study the livelihood of farmers in the surrounding communities of the giant panda protected land. Based on the data obtained from the field survey, the evaluation index of the natural resource dependence of the community farmers is established, and then the measurement model is constructed to analyze the main factors affecting the natural resource dependence of the communities. The results showed that: (1) The food dependence of farmers around the giant panda protected area is the highest (46.32%), followed by energy dependence (37.67%), and income dependence is the lowest (27.91%). (2) In terms of regional characteristics, the natural resource dependence of farmers is the lowest in Minshan and Qionglai, followed by Daxiangling and Xiaoxiangling, and Liangshan is the highest. (3) Physical capital has no significant effect on the natural resource dependence. The influence of human capital, natural capital, and social capital on the natural resource dependence is significant.

Due to the region’s social economy and historical culture, rough grazing has led to unresolved grassland-based ecological problems in Northern China. Soil microorganisms are essential structural and functional components of underground ecosystems, and the effects of various grazing intensities on the physicochemical properties and bacterial communities of soil are unclear. A stocking density regulation experiment was carried out in the desert steppe of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. In the study area, four grazing intensities were set, namely, the enclosure control group (CK), light grazing, moderate grazing, and heavy grazing. Field investigations and 16S rRNA sequencing were used to compare and analyze the characteristics of soil bacterial community structures and their correlations with soil nutrient factors under different grazing intensities. The experiment showed the following results: (1) The Shannon, Simpson, and Pielou indices of the light grazing group were significantly higher than those of the CK (p < 0.05), and the indices of the moderate and heavy grazing groups were lower than those of the CK, but the difference was not significant, and there were no significant differences in the Chao1 index between each group. (2) Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, and Chloroflexi were the main bacterial phyla. (3) With the exception of soil organic matter and available potassium, which had significant negative correlations with the Shannon index (p < 0.05), other soil factors had no significant correlation with the soil bacterial diversity. (4) The contents of soil organic matter, total phosphorus, alkali-hydrolyzed nitrogen, available phosphorus, and available potassium influenced the differences between soil bacterial communities under different grazing intensities.

The microbial quotient (Cmic/Corg) has been used extensively to evaluate agriculture soil fertility, but the microbial sensitivity should be considered during the forestry process. Therefore, the objective of this study was to examine a soil fertility evaluation method applied to four vegetation types in the Mu Us Sandland in northwestern China, using the relationship between the Cmic/Corg ratio and soil moisture, and soil temperature under the premise of microbial diversity. The final predictive value was C. microphylla (0.2198) > P. sylvestris (0.2175) > P. tabulaeformis (0.0872) > S.psammophila (0.0767). We verified the evaluation results using two traditional methods, the back-propagation (BP) artificial neural network model and principal component analysis, which are widely used to evaluate soil quality based on the soil nutrient concentration. The results were the same as the Cmic/Corg predictions. We conclude that when the soil microbes are used in soil quality evaluations, the changing pattern should be fully considered.