Paper short abstract:

Recent archaeological, archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological evidence from the Jiuzhaigou national park is challenging assumptions about how humans contributed to the high biodiversity of the Hengduan mountain chain and the effectiveness of China's Returning the farmlands to forests program.

Paper long abstract:

China's tuigeng huanlin or "Returning Farmland to Forest" program has been widely praised as the world's largest and most successful payment for ecosystem services program, as well as a major contributor to China's dramatic increase in forest cover from as low as 8% in 1960 to about 21% today. Located on the margins of the eastern Tibetan plateau, the Jiuzhaigou National Park is home to over 1950 species of plants along with many animals - at least 50 of them rare or endangered. In order to the preserve the biodiversity and the scenic lakes found in the area and believing that the history of human impact inside the park was relatively short, authorities decided to remove human impact, re-settling nine villages of Tibetans who occupied the area. Since 1999, park policies have prohibited residents from farming, and wood cutting and since 2001, residents can no longer herd animals above the treeline. For Tibetans, however, these narratives are at odds with their own histories of occupation of the region and the role they play in maintaining the natural diversity of their home. Recent archaeological, archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological evidence from the park is now challenging assumptions about the shallow time depth of human occupation in the region and shows that rather than harming local biodiversity, intermediate levels of disturbance created by small scale farming, pastoralism and tree cutting have contributed to the biodiversity of this region and have done so over the course of the past 5000 years.