WETLAND ECO-TOURISM RESOURCES PROTECTION AND EXPLOITATION IN DONGTING LAKE AREA

Dongting lake wetland constitutes one of the three major wetland resources concentrated in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. A special eco tourism landscape was formed under long term common interactions of special geographic environment, natural conditions and human activities. There are obvious circular landforms like dish shaped basin belt landforms, typical subtropical monsoon humid climate and extremely rich plant and animal resources that consist of principal factors of the region's eco tourism resources which are distributed in eastern, southern and western parts. The superior geographical location and typical seasonal eco landscape, uniqueness to the Dongting lake wetland eco tourism resources, make it a diversified eco tourism resources covering almost all subtropical interior wetland types. However, man's disturbances such as land reclamation, industrial waste and pesticide pollution, blindness hunting and fishing have resulted in fragility to the wetland ecosystems. Hence countermeasures should be taken to maintain natural ecosystem of the wetlands to a certain spatial extent, to provide solutions to conflicts between farmland and lake area, to minimize lake sedimentation, and to stabilize area of natural landscape of the lake and marshes, to enlarge natural protedted area and to rehabilitate wetland ecosystem. Long term ecological monitoring should be practiced. In a word, the exploitation of wetland eco tourism resources should be protective exploitation, and the tendency of only laying stress on production function and neglecting ecological function must be altered. The comprehensive exploitation of social, economic and ecological effects should be followed to realize sustainable utilization of wetland eco tourism resources.