Abstract: Ecological compensation represents a positive approach to protect the ecosystem, which has become an important tool in defining the global environment and development policy. As an ecologically fragile area, the development-restricted ecological zones are mainly responsible for ecological functions, and the activities that contradict ecological protection functions are limited. Therefore, the ecological compensation policy is applied in those zones with the intention to inspire and encourage the farmers in the zones to participate in the ecological environment protection and construction. It is of great significance to fully understand the farmers' participation willingness and its influencing factors to ensure a successful implementation of ecological compensation projects. Taking Yanchi County of Ningxia Province, China as an example, this study used the Logistic regression model to analyze the farmers' participation willingness and its influencing factors in the ecological compensation services applied in the development-restricted ecological area, based on the main function subdivision results of the development-restricted ecological zones in Ningxia and the household survey data. The main conclusions are as follows:(1)In general the farmers' satisfaction on the ecological compensation policy was high with an obvious regional difference based on different types of ecological zones. The satisfaction achieved the highest in the development-strongly-restricted zone, the lowest in the development-prohibited zone. The satisfaction had its medium value in the development-restricted zone and the development-weakly-restricted zone;(2)the farmers' cognizance of the policy was generally not high. 51.98% of the farmers had the knowledge about the policy and 28.31% of the farmers heard of the ecological compensation policy, without knowing the specific content of the policy, and 19.71% of the farmers do not understand it at all. In all types of zones, farmers in the developmentweakly-restricted zone had the highest cognizance level, followed by those in the development-restricted zone and those in the development-prohibited zone, and the farmers in the development-strongly-restricted zone had the lowest cognizance level;(3) the farmers' participation willingness was generally high with 73.12% of the farmers who responded positively to the ecological compensation policy willing to continue to participate in the new round of grazing grass ecological engineering, and 26.88% farmers who believed that the implementation of ecological compensation had a larger impact on its negative side, not willing to continue to participate. The farmers' willingness to participate in the program hit the highest in the development-strongly-restricted zone and the lowest in the development-prohibited zone. For the rest two zones, the willingness was in the middle. The farmer's willingness to participate in the program and his satisfaction on the previous policy were closely related;(4) the farmers' satisfaction on the previous policy, the arable land per capita, per capita grassland area, sheep stocks, age of householder, household income, the proportion of non-agricultural income have a significant impact on the willingness of farmers to participate in the ecological compensation policy. The satisfaction on previous policy, family income, the proportion of non-agricultural income had the positive effect, while other factors had the negative effect.

Key words: payments for environmental services, participation, factor analysis, Yanchi County