The Chinese government aims to deal with poverty by 2020 for people living in ethnic and rural regions, including mountainous ethnic regions with the highest concentration of poverty and chronic poverty. Based on a sustainable livelihood Framework, five capitals and 33 evaluation indices of livelihood were built, and 13 counties’ resources of the Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture were compared in order to calculate the degree of poverty. Topographic factors index of settlement sites (TFIS) were constructed by eight topographic factors, and diagnoses of the dominant factors of differentiation of 2699 settlements were calculated by using the geographical detector model to establish the poverty alleviation policies and models for different regions. The results showed that the livelihood capital evaluation indices were different (0.56–1.88), and natural capitals (mean value 1.56) had obvious advantages, but physical (mean value 0.56), financial (mean value 0.78), and human capital were lower (mean value 0.93), limiting the rate of transforming the ecological resources advantage into the economy. In the TFIS, the settlement points indicate topographic factors of natural breakpoint classification superposition, including elevation, slope, relief amplitude, surface incision, variance coefficient in elevation, surface roughness, distance to roads, and distance to rivers. These are within the 8–34 range, and their power determinant value to TFIS are 0.02, 0.70, 0.77, 0.76, 0.51, 0.66, 0.06, and 0.09. Livelihood capital evaluation indices and TFIS classification one (8–14) are positively correlated, and negative correlation (22–26 and 27–34) is at the 0.05 level. The county's poverty alleviation measures and development under different livelihood indices and TFIS indicate that the ecotourism industry has become the inevitable choice for promoting rapid and coordinated development of economy, society, and the environment in ethnic regions.

In order to combat land desertification and to evaluate the soil quality of different cover land types, and thereby determine the best land use strategy for vegetation restoration, this research comprehensively analyzed the soil quality of different land use/cover types in the hilly sandy area of the Loess Plateau by using the Kruskal–Wallis test (K–W test) and principal component analysis (PCA) technique for order preference by the similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), and the potential ecological risk index (RI). The result indicated that the cropland abandonment over a period of time could improve the soil quality to a certain extent; however, the process of natural restoration was very slow compared with that of the planted mixed shrubs. The soil quality of all land use/cover types in the hilly sandy area of Youyu County clearly improved after 10–25 years of revegetation, but the degree of improvement varied greatly with the different planted species and their combinations. The low levels of soil organic matter, total nitrogen and available phosphorus were the major limiting factors affecting soil quality improvement under different land use/cover types, not metal toxicity. Pioneer species of H. rhamnoide, C. korshinskii and Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica, etc. are vital to vegetation restoration of the study area. Revegetation using these species is therefore recommended to combat future desertification in this area.

He Jingming, Li Huixia, and Wang Qin (2004) Rural Tourism in China. Mountain Research and Development: Vol. 24, Focus Issue: Addressing Urbanization in Mountain Environments, pp. 260-262. https://doi.org/10.1659/0276-4741(2004)024[0260:RTIC]2.0.CO;2

The arid valley is a unique type of ecological fragile landscape in the Hengduan Mountain Area, China. The boundary of the arid valley is one of the response indicators to mountainous climate change. Based on the meteorological data from 1999 to 2013 and the SPOT remote sensing images in 1999 and 2013 this study explored the response characteristics of the arid valley boundary to regional climate change in the upper reaches of the Min River in the Hengduan Mountains. The results are as follows: (1) During 1999–2013, the temperature, precipitation, and evaporation increased, and the sunshine duration and relative humidity showed decreasing trends at the rates of 0.008 °C/a, 2.25 mm/a, 5.51 mm/a, −8.72 h/a, and −0.19%/a, respectively. Meanwhile, the climate showed the warm-dry tendency in the southern region and the warm-humid tendency in the central and northern areas. (2) On the whole, the arid valley boundary mainly distributed between 1601–3200 m and moved downward to 2428 m at the speed of −0.76 ± 0.26 m/a along with global warming. The descent speeds in different regions showed the same decreasing order as the regional distributions of precipitation and sunshine duration. (3) The arid valley boundary’s displacement in the whole basin had significant negative correlations with current climate change (p < 0.05), as well as with variations of moisture factors. Additionally, with the enhancements of the drought degree and humidity tendency, the variations of temperature, evaporation, and relative humidity, respectively, became the main factors that had significant correlations with the arid valley boundary’s displacement. Therefore, climate change during 1999–2013 shows beneficial effects on the improvement of the arid valley habitat in the upper reaches of the Min River. The study provides a new method and gives basic data for research on climate change.