A half‐century of changes in China's lakes: Global warming or human influence?

Abstract

Lake size is sensitive to both climate change and human activities, and therefore serves as an excellent indicator to assess environmental changes. Using a large volume of various datasets, we provide a first complete picture of changes in China's lakes between 1960s–1980s and 2005–2006. Dramatic changes are found in both lake number and lake size; of these, 243 lakes vanished mainly in the northern provinces (and autonomous regions) and also in some southern provinces while 60 new lakes appeared mainly on the Tibetan Plateau and neighboring provinces. Limited evidence suggested that these geographically unbalanced changes might be associated primarily with climate change in North China and human activities in South China, yet targeted regional studies are required to confirm this preliminary observation.

Lake Volume Monitoring from Space

“…In general, the magnitude of precipitation changes is too low to explain water level increasing a few decimeters per year as noted by Zhang et al (2011a). The impact of climate change on water resources over the TP is therefore very complex: a mix not only of direct precipitation changes and evaporation increase under a warming climate, but also of glaciers, snow, and thickening of the active layer of the permafrost, which increase surface and underground inflow to the lakes (Ma et al 2010;Liu et al 2009a;Kang et al 2010;Huang et al 2011;Zhang et al 2011a;Li et al 2014;Song et al 2014c;Zhang et al 2015). The decrease in the frozen duration due to warming, which is very pronounced in winter time, also increases the potential contribution of permafrost to lake storage changes (Huang et al 2011;Li et al 2008;Liao et al 2013).…”

Remote sensing of environmental change over China: A review

“…The spatial decomposition/interpolation has been done by converting county level population data to grids of 1 km 2 based on those land use maps derived from remotely sensed data [40]. A combination of photo interpretation of lake water bodies with those digitized from historical topographic maps resulted in a database on lake body changes over a 50 year period for all lakes whose area exceeds 1 km 2 in China [41]. Optical penetration depth over the continental shelf of the China sea has been measured with remote sensing and validated by on-site measurements for accuracy assessment [42].…”

Quantifying Streamflow Variations in Ungauged Lake Basins by Integrating Remote Sensing and Water Balance Modelling: A Case Study of the Erdos Larus relictus National Nature Reserve, China

“…Despite only covering a small fraction of land surface, lakes have been the subject of great interest as not only important sources of water supply, but also sensitive indicators of natural and anthropogenic impacts on changing environments at both regional and global scales [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. In recent years, variations in lake size and the water level have been widely documented all over the world [8][9][10][11][12].…”