Dau-Jye Lu

Local development in reservoir catchments is often sensitive and contested, as drinking-water protection frequently imposes strict constraints on land use and local livelihoods. This study examines the tea industry in Pinglin, a rural area in northern Taiwan located within the Feitsui Reservoir catchment, to analyze how local economic development has interacted with environmental policy—particularly water resource conservation—and how these interactions have shaped tea landscapes over time. Using a socio-ecological systems (SES) framework, the study employs qualitative methods including literature review, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS). These approaches document landscape and industry change and frame the tea industry as an outcome of interactions between land governance and water governance.Tea cultivation in Pinglin was introduced during the Qing dynasty, consolidated under Japanese colonial rule, and expanded after World War II, eventually becoming one of Taiwan’s best-known tea-producing regions. Transportation infrastructure emerged as a key driver of this process. Successive mobility corridors—from the Danlan Ancient Trail, to the Beiyi Road, and later an extensive network of industrial roads built between the 1970s and 2000s—connected producers to markets, supported settlement formation, and aligned Pinglin’s tea economy with Taiwan’s broader economic growth. During the 1980s and 1990s, these dynamics transformed a diverse agricultural mosaic of rice paddies, orchards, and tea gardens into landscapes dominated by tea plantations.This development trajectory shifted with the completion of the Feitsui Reservoir in the 1980s, which supplies drinking water to the Greater Taipei metropolitan area. The designation of a water source protection zone introduced increasingly strict land-use regulation, constraining the expansion and transformation of tea production and raising concerns related to residential land rights and housing justice. A second turning point followed the opening of National Freeway No. 5 in 2000, which reduced Pinglin’s role as a transportation node. Declining visitor numbers, population out-migration, and long-standing demographic aging combined to intensify economic challenges and weaken the social foundations of the tea industry.Local actors responded through multiple adaptation strategies, including mechanization, organic farming, cooperative production arrangements, and tourism-oriented initiatives. However, many of these efforts were limited by stringent land-use controls that restricted diversification and spatial reconfiguration. At the governance level, limited channels for local political participation further constrained adaptive capacity. Following administrative restructuring in 2010, local representation in this small-population area remained weak, contributing to a governance configuration increasingly oriented toward external and centralized water-resource priorities, with bottleneck effects on local development.Overall, the Pinglin tea industry emerges not simply as an outcome of environmental conditions, but as a dynamic product of transportation infrastructure, central policy intervention, land-use regulation, and local power relations—most critically, strict land-use control under reservoir water governance. Future work should both examine land-use–water quality relationships and explore environmentally friendly practices and locally applicable water-governance approaches. Strengthening meaningful local participation, through participatory platforms and more representative governance arrangements, may help advance reservoir catchment management that better balances conservation goals with equity and local development needs.

Marine biodiversity underpins the formation of marine protected areas (MPAs), necessitating detailed surveys to account for the dynamic temporal and spatial distribution of species influenced by tidal patterns and microhabitats. The reef rock intertidal zones adjacent to urban centers, such as Taiwan’s Cape Santiago, exhibit significant biodiversity, yet they are increasingly threatened by tourism-related activities. This study introduces an artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered citizen science (CS) approach within the local community to address these challenges. By integrating CS with AI, we establish a hybrid intelligence (HI) system that conducts in situ biological surveys and educational programs focused on reef ecological conservation. This initiative not only facilitates the collective gathering and AI-assisted analysis of critical data but also uses machine-learning outputs to gauge data quality, thus informing subsequent data collection and refinement strategies. The resulting collectivity and iterative enhancement foster a mutual and continuous HI learning environment. Our HI model proves instrumental in fostering community engagement and public involvement in CS endeavors, cultivating the skills necessary for documenting rocky intertidal biodiversity shifts. These efforts are pivotal for informing the design and governance of future MPAs, ensuring their efficacy and sustainability in marine conservation.

Pteropus dasymallus is widely distributed on islands throughout the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. The Formosan flying fox, P. d. formosus, is an endemic subspecies in Taiwan found mainly on Lyudao; it was previously thought to have been extirpated. Since 2005, intensive surveys have been conducted to investigate the residency, population size and plant resource utilization of P. dasymallus in Taiwan. Interviews were carried out to investigate its former abundance and the causes of population decline. In Taiwan, P. dasymallus is in a state of ongoing oceanic dispersal and colonization and has considerably expanded its geographic range. In addition to remaining in its historic habitat on Lyudao, P. dasymallus has also established colonies on Gueishan Island and in Hualien on Taiwan's main island in the past few decades. The total population size is estimated to be 240 individuals, and this number is on the rise. Approximately three-quarters of the entire population (73.64%) was found on Gueishan Island. The sex ratio was strongly skewed toward males. A total of 40 plant species were recorded as being used by the flying fox for food, roosts or perches. More agricultural and horticultural plant species were used by the flying fox in urban Hualien. According to the interviews, flying foxes were abundant on Lyudao, but their number dramatically declined from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, mainly due to commercial hunting. Maintaining a sufficient population size and genetic variability is fundamental to the long-term survival of the flying fox. Enforcing conservation laws, restoring habitats, controlling invasive species and improving public awareness are the main steps in the recovery and sustainability of the flying fox population.

While few studies examine the situations of the core areas for a large and integrated protected area, the present study targets and evaluates the management effectiveness of the Mt. Huangzui and Lujiaokeng Ecological Protected Areas in Yangmingshan National Park, Taiwan by using the Enhancing our Heritage (EoH) toolkit as a holistic and systematic approach. During 2016-17, data and information were gathered by literature review and interviews, and focus groups. In total, 54 interviews were conducted and 14 workshops were held, creating 132 records. The study results show that, even though the core areas were enlarged, current management work could deal with on-site situations. However, due to the lack of a clear strategy and objectives, a disconnect between management and planning, and insufficient basic information in both case studies, the tendency of threats/pressures reflected an overall decline in these core areas’ situations. Poor local participation is also one of the major deficiencies. Most of these weaknesses were also identified in Forestry Bureau Protected areas. This study suggests that the situation could be improved by strengthening the management planning logic of the national park plan. The results show the core area of a protected area could be holistically reviewed by management effectiveness evaluation. This study also found implementing EoH required sufficient data support as a prerequisite, and proved effective for analyzing the strengths and weaknesses, and revealing the needs of protected area management.

Based on the criterion of governance quality, this study aimed to use the case of community-based monitoring in Taiwanese Wu-Wei-Kang Wildlife Refuge to evaluate the impact of public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) on its governance quality regarding inclusiveness, respect, competence, visions and scopes, accountability, and equity. Our research included 31 informants and 75 records (25 by in-depth interview and 50 from participant observation) collected in the field from 2009 to 2015. The results show that there are several effects attributable to the application of PPGIS in substratum elevation monitoring, including generating high quality data; strengthening monitoring processes and extending attributes of its outputs by lay knowledge; promoting stakeholders’ understanding of wetlands and their involvement in negotiations; increasing their capacity and degree to participate in refuge management; amending visions and scopes of this refuge; rearranging stakeholder divisions of labor; and assisting local communities as partners of this refuge. This study demonstrates that governance quality could provide a useful concept for evaluating PPGIS effectiveness on stakeholders’ participation, knowledge interpretation, capacity and consensus building, decision-making, and distribution of rights. Being a sole case with a qualitative approach, further case studies need to be undertaken to better understand the relationships between protected area governance quality and PPGIS.

The present study aimed to explore traditional farming and its role in sustainable development of the mountainous area based on the indigenous community of Wutai in Taiwan as a case study. It adopted qualitative methods with an ethnographic orientation, to conduct in-depth interviews, participant observation, and focus groups as an integral component of public participation geographic information system (PPGIS), and aerial photo analysis to collect and analyze field data, mainly in 2013 and 2017. The results revealed the continuation of traditional farming practices guided by the traditional farming calendar and characterized by mixed cropping, inter cropping, and rotation, which optimized the use of limited arable lands in the area. These practices also contributed to maximizing and securing local food supply, and maintaining endemic crop varieties. The results suggested that traditional farming offered a way to overcome the limitation of modern agriculture and support ecotourism as a sustainable alternative to mass tourism, by preserving crop diversity, social institutions and cultural traditions, and stabilizing the local environment. Furthermore, our findings showed that traditional farming, in keeping with local capacity, was adaptable to the impacts of climate change. In the last two decades, a returning tide of young residents and retired people involved in traditional farming might play a key role in the slowing down of the loss of agricultural lands in Wutai, influenced by the fashion of healthy foods and environments, as well as development of local ecotourism industry. Learned from this study, while there would be some opportunity for traditional farming to be recognized as one of the key components to promote the sustainable development of indigenous villages in mountain areas, more policy incentives might be considered.

Adequate postnatal growth is important for young bats to develop skilled sensory and locomotor abilities, which are highly associated with their survival once independent. This study investigated the postnatal growth and development of Scotophilus kuhlii in captivity. An empirical growth curve was established, and the postnatal growth rate was quantified to derive an age-predictive equation. By further controlling the fostering conditions of twins, the differences in the development patterns between pups that received maternal care or were hand-reared were analyzed to determine whether the latter developed in the same manner as their maternally reared counterparts. Our results indicate that both forearm length and body mass increased rapidly and linearly during the first 4 weeks, after which the growth rate gradually decreased to reach a stable level. The first flight occurred at an average age of 39 days with a mean forearm length and body mass of 92.07% and 70.52% of maternal size, respectively. The developmental pattern of hand-reared pups, although similar to that of their maternally reared twin siblings, displayed a slightly faster growth rate in the 4th and 5th weeks. The heavier body mass of hand-reared pups during the pre-fledging period may cause higher wing loading, potentially influencing the flight performance and survival of the bats once independent. Zoo Biol. 35:35–41, 2016.

We show that tourism activities severely impact the ecology of Orchid Island, its natural resources, and the culture of the Tao tribe. For example, highway widening, in response to the increased traffic volumes caused by tourism, required many Pandanus trees to be cut and removed, which has placed the coconut crabs in danger of extinction. To promote eco-tourism, observation trips to observe Elegant Scops owls and Birdwing butterflies have taken place, which has affected the breeding of these two protected species. The Elegant Scops owls- and Birdwing butterflies-related tourism activities also break the “evil spirits” taboo of the Tao people and have caused the disappearance of the specifications for using traditional natural resources, causing natural ecosystems to face the threat of excessive use. In addition to promoting and advocating aboriginal tourism of the Tao people on Orchid Island, the Taiwanese government should help the Tao people to develop a management model that combines traditional regulations and tourism activities.