Driving forces behind land use and cover change in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau: a case study of the source region of the Yellow River, Qinghai Province, China

Abstract

Research on land use and cover change (LUCC) is an important aspect of the study of global change or global warming. The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is a good place to study global change because of its unique natural conditions, so we chose the source region of China's Yellow River for a case study of the driving forces behind LUCC. We used Landsat images obtained in 1989, 2000, and 2005 to establish databases of land use and cover at these times. We then derived LUCC information by overlaying these layers using GIS software. By studying the processes responsible for LUCC, we analyzed the driving forces, which included climatic change, human activities, animal and insect damage, and the influences of government policies. During the 16-year study period,

Relationship between the Growing Season Maximum Enhanced Vegetation Index and Climatic Factors on the Tibetan Plateau

“…Overgrazing can produce rangeland degradation or even desertification [54], whereas fencing and fertilization can increase plant biomass accumulation [52,53]. These human activities may partially dampen or strengthen the relationships between climatic factors and MEVI, which, in turn, may result in error.…”

Integrated studies of physical geography in China: Review and prospects

“…Socio-economic factors include economic development (Liu et al, 2014a), population growth (Liu et al, 2005), policy regulation (Xie et al, 2005), urbanization , land use management (Yu et al, 2011), advances of science and technology (Hai et al, 2005), road construction (Liang et al, 2014), and enhancement of environmental awareness (Fan et al, 2012). Physical factors include climatic change (Gao et al, 2006;Song et al, 2009), geomorphological processes (Wang et al, 2005a), water availability (Zhang et al, 2006), and land-ocean interactions . When it comes to the driving mechanism analyses of LUCC, domestic scholars attach much importance to a comprehensive cognition of the driving mechanisms of varied factors.…”

Remote sensing monitoring recent rapid increase of coal mining activity of an important energy base in northern China, a case study of Mu Us Sandy Land

“…In this study, a classification system for the land use/cover in the MUSL region have been introduced according to a modified version published in our previous work (Song et al, 2009). Six land use/cover types, namely vegetation, sparse vegetation, wetland, cultivated land, artificially surface, and non-used land, were defined by detailed consideration of the imaging spectral characteristics and indices are shown in Table 2, where the parameter of vegetation cover ratio (C r ) is defined as the percentage or fraction of occupation of vegetation canopy in a given ground area in vertical projection.…”

“…During interpretation, the following mapping principles were adopted: (1) the minimum mapping patch was 5*5 pixels; (2) the deviation of delineating locations was less than 1 pixel on the screen; and (3) the overall accuracy of classification was greater than 95%, which is defined as the proportion of pixels whose class labels agree with the ground reference. Other land cover types were interpreted using the similar method with previous works (Song et al, 2009).…”