Abstract: The establishment of protected areas system is an important measure to protect natural resources, ecological environment and biodiversity. Several geographic mathematical methods such as nearest neighbor index, central index of geography, kernel density estimation, and geo-detector were applied to study the spatial distribution characteristics and major influencing factors of four main protected areas including the nature reserves, forest parks, wetland parks, and state-owned forest farms in Zunyi City, Guizhou Province. The results show that:(1) The four types of protected areas in Zunyi City have obvious spatial aggregation, forming three high-density aggregation areas, showing the distribution characteristics of "northwest-southeast dense, southwest-northeast sparse". (2) The establishment of protected areas in Zunyi is not keeping up with the pace of the regional development, 64.29% of the regions belong to the "lagging" and "passive" types, forming a concentration area and a contiguous area. (3) The explanatory power of an individual influencing factor is not stable. Wetland area, per capita GDP and forest area are the main influencing factors of the spatial distribution of the studied protected areas; the explanatory power of any two combined influencing factors is significantly strengthened.

Key words: protected areas, distribution characteristic, geo-detector, Zunyi City