The deputy director for a Chinese Wildlife Conservation Department said a tour of national parks and reserves in the United States provided insights on managing visitors and methods for protecting natural areas — starting at the airports.

"On Maui, one of the things I was most impressed with was the management of invasive species," said Hongyan Guo, a Chinese State Forestry Administration executive who was with 30 nature reserve managers and conservation officials on the Maui leg of the tour last week.

"Even coming into the Maui airport, when we got off the plane, we need to fill in the forms to report if we are carrying any fruit or invasive species.

"And later, when we went to Haleakala National Park, everybody asked us to use the brush to brush our boots. So this means they are trying to control and manage the invasive plants very well," Guo said in a written response to questions posed by The Maui News.

"These two things impressed and inspired us a lot."

The group was in the U.S. under the auspices of the China Protected Areas Leadership Alliance Project, a collaborative program involving the Chinese State Forestry Administration and The Nature Conservancy's China Program, with support from the East-West Center on Oahu and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

According to Ian Dutton, Nature Conservancy deputy director for the Asia Pacific Region, about 16 percent of China has been formally protected as preserve, most of it in just the last 10 to 20 years.

The tour of U.S. national parks and natural area reserves gave Chinese conservation managers "a wonderful opportunity to 'look under the hood' of our national park system, to meet and learn from their peers and to bring these experiences back to their own country," he said.

The Nature Conservancy has provided consultants and training programs to assist the Chinese government in setting up conservation projects in areas such as Wolong Pitao Valley, a massive area that is home to the giant panda. Located in a rugged mountainous region that includes portions of Tibet, the Wolong National Nature Reserve is a habitat to other endangered species of animals, insects and plants, including the snow leopard and red panda.

Dutton said he provided training and assistance to Chinese reserve managers in setting up their conservation programs, as well as to other similar program managers in countries in the Pacific and Asia.

"Our primary role is our partnership with the states to build capacity to better manage their natural areas with training and sponsors to jointly fund projects. With the Chinese government, it is to follow up with projects to implement what they learned," he said.

In the U.S., the Chinese managers toured areas such as Yosemite National Park and the Adirondacks Park, a 134,100-acre area in New York state maintained as a forest ecosystem by The Nature Conservancy.

The program provided an introduction to different kinds of preservation programs implemented by government and by private conservation groups in the U.S., involving both cultural protection as well as preservation of natural areas, he said.

"In China, there is only one category of reserves, there are only nature reserves," he said.

In Hawaii, the tour spent a day with a quick hike into the Waikamoi Preserve followed by a tour of the crater area of Haleakala National Park.

"I noticed that in many of the national parks and preserves we visited, they quite cherish their history, not just the geographical history, but also the history of the native people of the area," Guo said.

"For the visitors and ecotourists, they're not just interested in the natural resources and the history and evolution of the wildlife, but they're also quite interested in the culture of the people who live there."

She said she believed there are many sites in China where reserve managers can similarly combine protection of elements of the natural and cultural history of a region.

There also were lessons in dealing with crowds, with the tour at Yosemite on the Memorial Day weekend, a holiday that draws heavy traffic to the park.

"Some knowledge and information that I think we can take home and use immediately includes how to manage the tourists and visitors when they go into the national parks," she said. "We can use that right now.

"As for the other issues, like habitat restoration and clearing out the existing alien species, maybe it will take more time. But we will do this in the future," she said.

Guo said she found that the transportation network at Yosemite and other parks "is well done."

"This means it can provide the safety for the visitors and tourists. Because in China (parks), there is often really no road, so people have to just walk," she said.

Dutton said the program may have accomplished its goal of introducing the Chinese reserve managers to new concepts and options for preserving resources.

"The primary goal is really to inspire them to think differently about conservation, expose them to new ideas and new concepts that were worked out carefully in the national parks," he said.

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