Determining the importance of core areas in the alpine shrub-meadow gradient zone of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Abstract Nature reserves have been established globally to protect wild species. However, an issue remains: How to determine the importance of core areas of nature reserves in maintaining the regional connectivity of corridors and the effectiveness of the core areas for species protection? This study aims to solve this problem in an alpine shrub-meadow vegetation zone in the north-eastern part of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. We used circuit theory to construct an ecological network for ungulate species. An index (Coreid) was proposed to reflect the importance degree of core areas using the product of the average current value and the pixel number of the corridors. The results showed that corridors are mainly located in the central and eastern regions of the study area, which are areas with generally low resistance values. We also generated the importance degree of core areas based on the Coreid index. The spatial distribution of the importance degree of core areas is characterized by gradual weakening from east to west. We found that the existing nature reserves are not sufficiently effective for the protection of ecological corridors, and only 53.28% of corridors are under protection by nature reserves. Our study can guide conservation management in the study area and provide a reference method for determining the importance degree of core areas.