## 1 Introduction  
The present study seeks to examine institutional arrangements and distribution of rights and duties, etc. for governance of protected areas (PA) [(1; 2; 3)]. Due to increases in conflicts with stakeholders, mainly from local communities, and increases in the number and area of PA, a paradigm shift in the management of PA has been noted in recent years. The traditional paradigm of PA management, characterized by dominance of natural scientists and government agents, has been replaced by a PA management paradigm that includes a sociopolitical process of stakeholder consultation and wise exercise of judgment [(4)]. Under this new paradigm, the international conservation community now tends to regard the participation of stakeholders as the proper basis for the governance of PA [(5; 6)]. Since members of local communities rank among the main stakeholders of PA, their views and standpoints regarding the utilization, distribution, monitoring, and social norms with respect to natural resources are considered important references for the management of PA [(7; 8)]. At the same time,the governance of PA is a highly complex affair, involving a variety of objective factors (e.g., land use, funding, management organizations, and local rights) and is usually faced with competition among different management strategies [9]. Therefore, questions concerning the form that participation by local communities should take and how the output of such participation can improve the management effectiveness and governance quality of PA have become popular research topics for the international conservation community [10]. Because the management of PA involves a variety of objective items (e.g., environmental sensitivity, biological habitat, administrative boundary, and land utilization), it could usefully adopt geospatial information technologies, such as geographic information system (GIS), which is widely applied in PA management at present [11; 12]. However, since GIS offers completely quantitative geospatial information, some consider GIS to be an elitist and antidemocratic technology, based on high technology, and expensive to implement and operate [13]. Although GIS can streamline and accelerate decision-making processes, it may also marginalize local communities and individuals who lack access to it, leading to the brushing aside of their opinions as a consequence [12]. In this perspective, widescale application of GIS to natural resource management has been criticized for strengthening the dominance of elites and authorities and for aggravating the already unequal power relations among stakeholders [14; 15; 16]. While applications of a variety of participatory methods have become increasingly important in recent decades, such as community-based participatory research (CBPR), participatory action research, participatory rural appraisal, and participatory mapping [17; 18; 16], public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) has been applied in PA management [19; 20; 21] and is regarded as offering a participatory interface or tool that could incorporate social intentions [22; 23; 24]. As to advanced geospatial information technologies (GITs), PPGIS allows local stakeholders participation, knowledge interpretation, capacity, consensus building, and decision-making through the governance process [25; 26; 27; 28]. By PPGIS, stakeholders can jointly produce geospatial information with local perspectives through public participation processes and can integrate such information with relevant scientific knowledge so as to adjust the procedure and quality of decision-making of PA [29; 30] in ways that incorporate social considerations in PA governance [31; 32; 33]. Furthermore, the way the existing PA decision-making mechanism is influenced by PPGIS is also one of the main issues of the current PPGIS research community [11; 29].