The temporal change of driving factors during the course of land desertification in arid region of North China: the case of Minqin County

Ma, Yonghuan; Song, Fan; Zhou, Lihua; Dong, Zhaoyang; Zhang, Kecun; Feng, Juan

doi:10.1007/s00254-006-0369-z

Cited by 64 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Desertification is the most typical and serious type of land degradation in arid areas (Lin and Tang 2002;Chen and Duan 2008). Vegetation degradation is a major contributory factor to desertification particularly with regard to soil erosion and loss of soil organic matter (Ma et al 2007;Hanafi and Jauffret 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term changes of Tamarix-vegetation in the oasis-desert ecotone and its driving factors: implication for dryland management

Wang

Zhu

et al. 2009

Environ Earth Sci

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The Oasis-desert ecotone plays an important role in ensuring oasis ecological security. This study was to determine the main factors on the changes of desert vegetation in the oasis-desert ecotone, and to understand the mechanisms of the long-term changes. During past 50 years, the dominant plant species of Tamarix-vegetation in the Minqin oasis-desert ecotone changed from mesophytes to xerophytes and finally to super-xerophytes. The vegetative distribution area (belt width of Tamarix-vegetation between desert and oasis) markedly decreased from 1,000 m past to 30 m current. The coverage of Tamarix bushes reduced from 25 to 7%. The importance value (IV) of the bushes fell from 0.957 to 0.752, and Simpson index decreased from 0.702 in 1959-0.589 in 1992, and then increased to 0.712 in 2002. These changes in vegetation were closely related with the rapid decrease of groundwater table and the reduction of soil moisture due to unsustainable use of water resources for expanded agriculture development. These findings suggested that the change of Tamarixvegetation in the oasis-desert ecotone was a process of vegetation degradation and concurrent desertification. The maintaining of stable groundwater and Tamarix-vegetation is a vital prerequisite for dryland management, especially, conserving ecological health of oasis-desert systems.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-term changes of Tamarix-vegetation in the oasis-desert ecotone and its driving factors: implication for dryland management

Wang

Zhu

et al. 2009

Environ Earth Sci

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“…One type of assessing methods build statistic models by selecting census data from meteorological stations and social-economy statistical yearbooks as independent variables and sandy desertification data as dependant variables to assess the relative role of climate change and human activities, such as regression model and principal component analysis, etc. [8][9][10][11] . However, these methods excessively focus on using regression coefficient or the percentage of total variance explained by variables to represent the relative role of climate change and human activities in sandy desertification, it always ignores its ecological significance in practice, which may induce unreasonable explanation sometimes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the relative role of climate change and human activities in sandy desertification of Ordos region, China

Xiangwu

Liu

et al. 2009

Sci. China Ser. D-Earth Sci.

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Climate change and human activities are driving forces of sandy desertification and the relative role of them in sandy desertification is the hot point in related researches. A study was carried to assess the relative role of climate change and human activities in sandy desertification of Ordos region in China. Potential NPP and the difference between potential and actual NPP were selected as indicators to assess the relative role of climate change and human activities in sandy desertification, respectively. Assessing methods were built based on some scenarios for the reversion and expansion of sandy desertification and the relative role of climate change and human activities in sandy desertification ofOrdos region were assessed from 1981 to 2000. The results showed that although some local places experienced an expansion of sandy desertification, the change of sandy desertification of Ordos region from 1981 to 2000 showed a stably reversing trend. The relative role of climate change and human activities in sandy desertification of Ordos region varied at different temporal and spatial scales in the reversion and expansion processes. In the reversion of sandy desertification, climate change was the dominant factor in the period of 1981 to 1990 and the reversed areas mainly induced by climate change including Mu Us sandy land and the transition zone between temperate steppe and temperate deciduous scrubs in north east of Ordos region; however, human activities controlled the reversed process during the period from 1991 to 2000 and the areas mainly induced by human activities distributed in all banners of Ordos region. In the expansion of sandy desertification, human activities were the dominant factor in the period of 1981 to 1990 and the expanded areas mainly included the regions around common boundary of Hanggin, Dalad Banners and Dongsheng City; however, climate change dominated the expansion of sandy desertification from 1991 to 2000, the expanded areas equably distributed in the whole of Ordos region except the south east of Otog Qian, Uxin and Jungar Banners.

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“…The previous studies mainly focused on steppe degradation in arid and semiarid regions [51,52,54,58,[84][85][86]95]. However, we found the spatial diversity of steppe sustainability degradation distributed in all types of geomorphic regions as the Figures 2 and 3 shown.…”

Section: Dynamics Of Steppe Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 62%

A System Analysis on Steppe Sustainability and Its Driving Forces—A Case Study in China

et al. 2018

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Abstract:Steppe is an indispensable component for terrestrial ecosystems and it is of great significance to systematically analyze steppe sustainability and its driving forces. In this study, we propose a steppe dynamics ranking method based on Pauta criterion and a steppe sustainability assessment method with an effect matrix. The natural driving forces on steppe sustainability were systematically analyzed using the copula model, and the anthropogenic driving factors, including land use, were analyzed by using spatial overlay and statistical analysis methods. The results showed the following: (1) in general, steppe sustainability showed a trend of improvement from 2001 to 2010 in China. However, there were still some degraded areas scattered within the study area; (2) the consistent effect of steppe dynamics on steppe sustainability was significant on the whole, although there was a diverse effect on it; (3) among the natural factors, precipitation was the strongest positive driving force, followed by temperature average, while sunshine duration had strong negative driving force. The impact caused by land use factors was controlled during that decade, and the steppe land that evolved from urban and built-up land, cropland, and forest was vulnerable and resulted in steppe sustainability degradation.

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The temporal change of driving factors during the course of land desertification in arid region of North China: the case of Minqin County

Cited by 64 publications

References 11 publications

Long-term changes of Tamarix-vegetation in the oasis-desert ecotone and its driving factors: implication for dryland management

Long-term changes of Tamarix-vegetation in the oasis-desert ecotone and its driving factors: implication for dryland management

Assessing the relative role of climate change and human activities in sandy desertification of Ordos region, China

A System Analysis on Steppe Sustainability and Its Driving Forces—A Case Study in China

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