Tourists stay in hotels, eat local products and buy local souvenirs. We don't see ourselves as a destructive force, but we are. They also more closely examined human population dynamics for further clues into why the rate of habitat destruction increased dramatically inside the reserve after the reserve was established. Over time, the percentage of young people living in Wolong has increased. That means they have more labor force, more young people to go to the mountains to cut down the trees.
People perceive protected areas as the last resource for protecting biodiversity.
What they don't realize is that even high-profile protected areas like Wolong Nature Reserve may not be really protected. Both Liu and Linderman point to the need for integrating ecology with human demography and behavior as well as socioeconomics to understand the role of protected areas in fostering biodiversity around the globe. The National Science Foundation, NASA and the National Institutes of Health are the major funding sources that supported this research. This Landsat 7 project is part of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, an interdisciplinary research program dedicated to improving our understanding of the Earth system and how it is changing due to both natural and human-induced processes.