mostly informed by the monitoring program of nature reserve, expertise inquiring and documented literature.
In this research, ecotopes were employed in defining the habitat suitability of focal species, which can be
regarded as a basic unit of landscape structure, composing of abiotic and biotic elements on site. To facilitate the
habitat suitability analysis, ecotopes were simplified as physiotopes and land cover types (or vegetation types).
Physiotopes refers to the abiotic condition in site level (Harms 1995). As the abiotic condition of Hengshui Lake is
mainly shaped by site-based water level and landform, this two factors were chosen and combined to define the
physiotopes with their different combinations (table 1).The methodology of defining habitat suitability based on the
concept of ecotope can be referred by the similar previous research of Zhangdu Lake (Li et al 2005).