Water environmental degradation is a major issue in the Heihe River Basin belonging to the inland river basin of temperate arid zone in northwestern China. Mankind's activities, such as dense population and heavy dependence on irrigated agriculture, place immense pressure on available and limited water resources during the last century, especially the recent five decades. An investigation on the water environmental degradation in the Heihe River Basin and analysis of its causation were conducted. The results indicated that water environmental changes in the whole basin were tremendous mostly in the middle reaches, which reflected in surface water runoff change, decline of groundwater table and degeneration of surface water and groundwater quality. Some new forms of management based on traditional and scientific knowledge must be introduced to solve problems of water environmental degradation in the Heihe River Basin.

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Coal mining subsidence is a common human geological disaster that was particularly conspicuous in China. It seriously restricts the sustainable development of mining areas, and it not only damages land resources but also triggers a series of ecological and environmental problems that may result in social and economic issues. This report studied the coal mining subsidence area of Longkou in Shandong province and uses digital elevation data (DEM) of the mining area before subsidence in 1978 as the baseline elevation. Through image algorithms, we obtained coal mining subsidence region data for 1984, 1996, 2000, and 2004. And with spatial data sources of the same period of TM/ETM ? and SPOT5 remote sensing images, BP artificial neural network (BPNN) classification is used to extract surface landscape information in the subsidence area. With the support of GIS technology, superimposing subsidence area on the surface landscapeusing the largest landscape ecology patch index, landscape shape index, landscape condensation index, and the index of landscape distribution-report analyzes the mining landscape changes before and after subsidence. This study also carries on exploratory research with the landscape changes, thereby providing a scientific basis for integrated prevention and treatment.

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