Impacts of land use change and climate variability on green and blue water resources in the Weihe River Basin of northwest China

Zhao, Anzhou; Zhu, Xiufang; Liu, Xianfeng; Pan, Yaozhong; Zuo, Depeng

doi:10.1016/j.catena.2015.09.018

Cited by 125 publications

(84 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Although the Ens performance statistic associated with SWAT runoff modeling can be larger than 0.8 in small or humid basins (e.g., Luo et al, 2008;Qiao et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2016), Ens is typically less than 0.7 in relatively large river basins in arid to semi-arid regions (e.g., Xu et al, 2011;Notter et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2016). The Ens values in this study were generally good in the calibration and validation periods and were comparable to those reported in other studies in arid to semi-arid river basins.…”

Section: Performance Of the Swat Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of land use/land cover and climate changes on surface runoff in a semi-humid and semi-arid transition zone in northwest China

Yin

Xiong

et al. 2017

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

164

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Abstract. Water resources, which are considerably affected by land use/land cover (LULC) and climate changes, are a key limiting factor in highly vulnerable ecosystems in arid and semi-arid regions. The impacts of LULC and climate changes on water resources must be assessed in these areas. However, conflicting results regarding the effects of LULC and climate changes on runoff have been reported in relatively large basins, such as the Jinghe River basin (JRB), which is a typical catchment (> 45 000 km 2 ) located in a semi-humid and arid transition zone on the central Loess Plateau, northwest China. In this study, we focused on quantifying both the combined and isolated impacts of LULC and climate changes on surface runoff. We hypothesized that under climatic warming and drying conditions, LULC changes, which are primarily caused by intensive human activities such as the Grain for Green Program, will considerably alter runoff in the JRB. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was adopted to perform simulations. The simulated results indicated that although runoff increased very little between the 1970s and the 2000s due to the combined effects of LULC and climate changes, LULC and climate changes affected surface runoff differently in each decade, e.g., runoff increased with increased precipitation between the 1970s and the 1980s (precipitation contributed to 88 % of the runoff increase). Thereafter, runoff decreased and was increasingly influenced by LULC changes, which contributed to 44 % of the runoff changes between the 1980s and 1990s and 71 % of the runoff changes between the 1990s and 2000s. Our findings revealed that large-scale LULC under the Grain for Green Program has had an important effect on the hydrological cycle since the late 1990s. Additionally, the conflicting findings regarding the effects of LULC and climate changes on runoff in relatively large basins are likely caused by uncertainties in hydrological simulations.

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Section: Performance Of the Swat Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of land use/land cover and climate changes on surface runoff in a semi-humid and semi-arid transition zone in northwest China

Yin

Xiong

et al. 2017

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

164

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“…There are numerous studies that investigate the impacts of climate and land use/cover changes on water resources availability based on hydrological model [10,[23][24][25][26], but few address how climate change impacts streamflow at a long time period and what role land cover change plays in runoff change. These issues remain to be resolved [16,27].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long Term Quantification of Climate and Land Cover Change Impacts on Streamflow in an Alpine River Catchment, Northwestern China

Yin¹,

Feng²,

Yang³

et al. 2017

Sustainability

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Abstract:Quantifying the long term impacts of climate and land cover change on streamflow is of great important for sustainable water resources management in inland river basins. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was employed to simulate the streamflow in the upper reaches of Heihe River Basin, northwestern China, over the last half century. The Sequential Uncertainty Fitting algorithm (SUFI-2) was selected to calibrate and validate the SWAT model. The results showed that both Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) and determination coefficient (R 2 ) were over 0.93 for calibration and validation periods, the percent bias (PBIAS) of the two periods were-3.47% and 1.81%, respectively. The precipitation, average, maximum, and minimum air temperature were all showing increasing trends, with 14.87 mm/10 years, 0.30 • C/10 years, 0.27 • C/10 year, and 0.37 • C/10 years, respectively. Runoff coefficient has increased from 0.36 (averaged during 1964 to 1988) to 0.39 (averaged during 1989 to 2013). Based on the SWAT simulation, we quantified the contribution of climate and land cover change to streamflow change, indicated that the land cover change had a positive impact on river discharge by increasing 7.12% of the streamflow during 1964 to 1988, and climate change contributed 14.08% for the streamflow increasing over last 50 years. Meanwhile, the climate change impact was intensive after 2000s. The increasing of streamflow contributed to the increasing of total streamflow by 64.1% for cold season (November to following March) and 35.9% for warm season (April to October). The results provide some references for dealing with climate and land cover change in an inland river basin for water resource management and planning.

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“…However, to our knowledge, only Zhao et al [41] have studied land cover change, investigating the effects of land cover change and climatic variability on green and blue water resources. Although Zhao et al examined the combined impacts of land cover change, expansion of agricultural irrigation and climatic variations on water resources; however, they did not quantify the individual impacts of these factors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatiotemporal Impacts of Climate, Land Cover Change and Direct Human Activities on Runoff Variations in the Wei River Basin, China

Li¹,

Chang²,

Wang³

et al. 2016

Water

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Previous studies that quantified variations in runoff have mainly focused on the combined impacts of climate and human activities or climate and land cover change. Few have separated land cover change from human activities, which is critical for effective management of water resources. This study aims to investigate the impact of changing environmental conditions on runoff using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model; we examined three categories: climate, land cover change and direct human activities. The study area was the Wei River Basin, a typical arid to semi-arid basin that was divided into five sub-zones (UZ, MZ, DZ, JZ and BZ). Our results showed the following: (1) the calibrated SWAT model produced satisfactory monthly flow processes over the baseline period from 1978 to 1986; (2) compared to the baseline period, the impact of climatic variations decreased and the impact of direct human activities increased from the 1990s to the 2000s, while the impact of land cover change was generally stable; and (3) climatic variations were the main cause of runoff declines over the entire basin during the 1990s and in the UZ, MZ and JZ areas during the 2000s, while direct human activities were most important in the DZ and BZ areas during the 2000s.

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Impacts of land use change and climate variability on green and blue water resources in the Weihe River Basin of northwest China

Cited by 125 publications

References 40 publications

Effects of land use/land cover and climate changes on surface runoff in a semi-humid and semi-arid transition zone in northwest China

Effects of land use/land cover and climate changes on surface runoff in a semi-humid and semi-arid transition zone in northwest China

Long Term Quantification of Climate and Land Cover Change Impacts on Streamflow in an Alpine River Catchment, Northwestern China

Spatiotemporal Impacts of Climate, Land Cover Change and Direct Human Activities on Runoff Variations in the Wei River Basin, China

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