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The Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program is an innovative approach that provides economic incentives directly to natural resource exploiters in order to shape their behavior. Although the implementation of PES programs and the context in which these programs are implemented are often different across space, the spatial heterogeneities in the impacts of PES programs are often neglected in studies. In this study, we demonstrate the spatial and temporal dynamics of the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) in the grassland where China's Grassland Ecological Compensation Program (GECP) has been implemented, and we evaluate the impacts of the GECP on the NDVI. We found that most of the grassland in the GECP area showed small changes in NDVI between 2000 and 2010. On average, the GECP only had a marginal positive effect on the NDVI of grassland. Although the magnitude of impacts of the GECP was relatively small in most places where the program is implemented, we detected substantial heterogeneities in the impacts of the GECP on the NDVI. The impact of the GECP on the NDVI differed substantially, particularly between Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, and other provinces. Our findings suggest that there can be substantial heterogeneities in the impacts of PES programs across space, which can be leveraged to promote the efficacy of the GECP and many other PES programs around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is transforming its management of protected areas by establishing a national park system. To balance the needs of conservation and development, the national parks will adopt a zoning designation to delimit land in the parks for different purposes. These include a core zone that covers critical areas for conservation and allows few human uses, and a control zone that permits a wider range of development activities. However, the efficacy and management challenges of this zoning scheme are largely unknown. Using the Giant Panda National Park (GPNP) in Sichuan Province as an example, we evaluated the efficacy of the park's zoning designations by assessing the spatial distribution of critical habitat areas for panda conservation and human disturbance across different zones. Our results show that the core zone of the GPNP performs well in covering the majority of panda habitat (80%), highly suitable habitat (81%), and habitat patches that can support a viable panda population (80%). There is still space for improvement, however, because a significant portion (39%) of the potential corridors that require strict protections fall outside the core zone. Human disturbances are prevalent in the core zone of the park, representing a major challenge to achieving the management goal of eliminating human disturbances in the core zone. Our analyses and methods provide crucial information and tools to inform the design and management of the zoning designations of the GPNP and other PAs in China and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]