The planning of prior conservation areas is an important part of nature re- serve system, ：it is of great significance for biodiversity conservation. The methods of priority planning include hot-spots analysis, gap analysis, systematic conservation planning analysis and multi-criteria decision analysis. The key issues of priority area planning include the determination of the protect objects, the analyses of the protec- tion value and protection cost, the win-win development of protection and economy, and the changes of the management strategies of the protected areas. In this study, the features and research progress of different conservation methods were analyzed, and based on the discussion on the key issues of the planning of the protected areas, the application prospect of different methods was analyzed.
