Attribution assessment and projection of natural runoff change in the Yellow River Basin of China

Yuan, Zhe; Yan, Denghua; Yang, Zhiyong; Xu, Jiang; Huo, Junjun; Zhou, Yanlai; Cheng, Zhongqi

doi:10.1007/s11027-016-9727-7

Cited by 27 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…While effective soil erosion control by afforestation can lower surface runoff and "green up" China's drylands, these new forests have resulted in unintended local and regional water shortages, particularly in the Loess Plateau (Wang et al, 2012;Yao, Xiao, Shen, Wang, & Jiao, 2016;Yuan et al, 2018;Zhang, Podlasly, Feger, Wang, & Schwärzel, 2015;Zhang et al, 2014;Zhao, Mu, Strehmel, & Tian, 2014). Rainfall is the primary source of water for plant growth there and the amount of rainfall infiltrating into the soil depends on soil surface conditions; they control the partitioning of rainfall into overland flow and subsurface flow feeding soil water storage (Falkenmark & Rockström, 2006).However, water is not only partitioned at the soil surface but also in the root zone.…”

Section: Dilemma Of Soil Conservation Through Afforestationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How afforestation affects the water cycle in drylands: A process‐based comparative analysis

Schwärzel

Zhang

Montanarella

et al. 2019

Global Change Biology

145

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The world's largest afforestation programs implemented by China made a great contribution to the global “greening up.” These programs have received worldwide attention due to its contribution toward achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, emerging studies have suggested that these campaigns, when not properly implemented, resulted in unintended ecological and water security concerns at the regional scale. While mounting evidence shows that afforestation causes substantial reduction in water yield at the watershed scale, process‐based studies on how forest plantations alter the partitioning of rainwater and affect water balance components in natural vegetation are still lacking at the plot scale. This lack of science‐based data prevents a comprehensive understanding of forest‐related ecosystem services such as soil conservation and water supply under climate change. The present study represents the first “Paired Plot” study of the water balance of afforestation on the Loess Plateau. We investigate the effects of forest structure and environmental factors on the full water cycle in a typical multilayer plantation forest composed of black locust, one of the most popular tree species for plantations worldwide. We measure the ecohydrological components of a black locust versus natural grassland on adjacent sites. The startling finding of this study is that, contrary to the general belief, the understory—instead of the overstory—was the main water consumer in this plantation. Moreover, there is a strict physiological regulation of forest transpiration. In contrast to grassland, annual seepage under the forest was minor in years with an average rainfall. We conclude that global long‐term greening efforts in drylands require careful ecohydrologic evaluation so that green and blue water trade‐offs are properly addressed. This is especially important for reforestation‐based watershed land management, that aims at carbon sequestration in mitigating climate change while maintaining regional water security, to be effective on a large scale.

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Section: Dilemma Of Soil Conservation Through Afforestationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How afforestation affects the water cycle in drylands: A process‐based comparative analysis

Schwärzel

Zhang

Montanarella

et al. 2019

Global Change Biology

145

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“…At the same time, the impact of human activities on hydrological processes is mainly through land use, soil and water conservation and water conservancy projects to change the underlying surface properties of the basin, so as to lead to spatial-temporal variations in the hydrological cycles and exert impact on runoff [7,8]. As a result, how to accurately separate the comprehensive impacts and quantitatively assess the impacts of climate change and human activities on runoff is one of the key issues of scientific research in hydrology and meteorology [9], which is of great significance for better and clearer ascertaining of the causes of runoff change and for water resources planning and management in a basin [10]. Various statistical methods and hydrological models have been used by numerous scholars to study the effects of climate change and human activities on runoff changes in river basins of China and other countries [11,12,13,14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As for hydrological models, on the one hand, because hydrological models require enormous input datasets (e.g., surface condition, water intake engineering, and engineering scheduling) to calibrate and validate in the process of modeling, these data may not be available in many cases, so it is difficult to establish accurate hydrological models [15,17]. Therefore, generally speaking, hydrological models are just suitable for the analysis of typical catchments and regions, but they are difficult to popularize and apply in large-scale basins [10,18]. On the other hand, due to the fact that the dominant factors of water cycle processes at different time and watershed scales are significantly different, hydrological models are usually calibrated and validated on small time (monthly and daily scales, etc.)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recently, this method has been widely applied in different regions of the world [19,20] for studying the runoff change response to climate change and human activities. Because it not only has a solid scientific base [16], but also is relatively simple: only some meteorological data need to be input and only one parameter needs to be calibrated [10]. Furthermore, the performance of these methods used in large scale catchments can meet the requirements of calculation accuracy and even can perform as good as the more complex hydrological models and statistical analysis [19,21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Attribution of Runoff Variation in the Headwaters of the Yangtze River Based on the Budyko Hypothesis

Liu

Chen

et al. 2019

IJERPH

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Quantifying the contributions of climate change and human activities on runoff changes is of great importance for water resource management, sustainable water resource utilization, and sustainable development of society. In this study, hydrological and climatic data from hydrological and meteorological stations in the headwaters of the Yangtze River (YRHA) from 1966 to 2013 were used to quantitatively attribute the runoff change to the impacts of climate change and human activities separately. Firstly, the change trends in precipitation, runoff depth and potential evapotranspiration were analyzed by the Mann-Kendall test method. Three methods, secondly, including ordered clustering, Mann-Kendall and cumulative anomaly curve were adopted to detect the change points of runoff at Zhimenda hydrological station and partition the whole study period into two sub-periods at the change point (base and impacted periods). Then, the elasticity coefficient method based on the Budyko hypothesis was applied to calculate elasticity coefficients of runoff to precipitation, potential evapotranspiration and land use/cover during the two periods, and to evaluate the contributions of climate change and human activities. Results indicated that during 1966–2013, runoff depth, precipitation and potential evapotranspiration all showed a significant increasing trend, with increasing rates of 7.26 mm decade−1, 18.725 mm decade−1 and 7.228 mm decade−1, respectively. One change point (2004) was detected for the annual runoff, and 1966–2003 and 2004–2013 were respectively identified as base and impacted periods. The results of elasticity coefficients showed that the runoff depth was most sensitive to the change of precipitation during the two periods. The relative contributions of precipitation, potential evapotranspiration and parameter n to runoff changes were 99.7%, −6.08% and 3.88%, respectively. Furthermore, the coupled contribution rate of other factors was less than 2.5%. Generally, results indicated that precipitation is the main factor on the historical runoff changes in this basin.

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“…It was reported that global warming and human activities have a significant impact on the spatiotemporal evolution of the water resources in the river basin (Chen, Xia, Zhao, et al, 2014;Li, Shen, Dai, et al, 2012;Yuan, Xu, & Wang, 2018;Yuan, Yan, Yang, et al, 2018). The spatiotemporal variation of each hydrological component in the basin is crucial for an accurate, reliable, and comprehensive runoff forecast, which is particularly relevant in the YRB where multiple hydropower reservoirs are to be built.…”

Section: Trend and Mutation Analysis Of Precipitation And Runoffmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the climate and human impacts on the hydrology of the Yalong River Basin using two approaches

Zhao

Dong

Wang

2021

River Research & Apps

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Runoff in many river basins worldwide has shown an alteration under the impact of global climate change and increasing human activities. A detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis on the impact of climate change and human activities is therefore of great significance towards the sustainable water resources planning and management. In this study, the impact of climate change and human activities on the runoff was first quantitatively analyzed for the Yalong River Basin (YRB), China, by using a combination of the CREST hydrologic model and the Choudhury-Yang equation based elastic coefficient method, respectively. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis on the response of runoff to human activities was carried out in terms of land use changes, water withdrawal and reservoir operation. Results indicate that precipitation and runoff of the Yalong River Basin increased and decreased at the rate of 1.17 and 0.35 mm/a, respectively, for the period from 1980 to 2018. Climate change and human activities contributed 6.65-21.67% and 78.33-93.35% to the runoff variation, respectively. Among the human activities, we found that reservoir construction and operation is likely to be the major driver of the variation in the hydrologic regime of the YRB. Our methods and findings are expected to provide implications for water resources planning and management for the YRB and different basins across the globe.

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Attribution assessment and projection of natural runoff change in the Yellow River Basin of China

Cited by 27 publications

References 38 publications

How afforestation affects the water cycle in drylands: A process‐based comparative analysis

How afforestation affects the water cycle in drylands: A process‐based comparative analysis

Attribution of Runoff Variation in the Headwaters of the Yangtze River Based on the Budyko Hypothesis

Quantifying the climate and human impacts on the hydrology of the Yalong River Basin using two approaches

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