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| Titel |
Three Gorges Reservoir Area: soil erosion under natural condition vs. soil erosion under current land use |
| VerfasserIn |
Sarah Schönbrodt, Thorsten Behrens, Thomas Scholten |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2010
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 12 (2010) |
| Datensatznummer |
250043293
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Apparently, the current most prominent human-induced example for large scale environmental impact is the Three Gorges Dam in China. The flooding alongside the Yangtze River, and its tributaries results in a vast loss of settlement and farmland area with productive, fertile valley soils. Due to the associated high land use dynamic on uphill-sites, the soil resources are underlying high land use pressure. Within our study, the soil erosion under natural conditions is compared to the soil erosion under current land use after the impoundment. Both were modeled using the empirical Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) which is able to predict long-term annual soil loss with limited data. The database consists of digital terrain data (45 m resolution DEM, erosive slope length based on Monte-Carlo-Aggregation according to Behrens et al. (2008)), field investigations of recent erosion forms, and literature studies. The natural disposition to soil erosion was calculated considering the USLE factors R, S, and K. The soil erosion under current land use was calculated taking into account all USLE factors. The study area is the catchment of the Xiangxi River in the Three Gorges Reservoir area. Within the Xiangxi Catchment (3,200 km²) the highly dynamic backwater area (580 km²), and two micro-scale study sites (Xiangjiaba with 2.8 km², and Quyuan with 88 km²) are considered more detailed as they are directly affected by the river impoundment. Central features of the Xiangxi Catchment are the subtropical monsoon climate, an extremely steep sloping relief (mean slope angle 39°, SD 22.8°) artificially fractured by farmland terraces, and a high soil erodibility (mean K factor 0.37, SD 0.13).
On the catchment scale the natural disposition to soil erosion makes up to mean 518.0 t ha-1 a-1. The maximum potential soil loss of 1,730.1 t ha-1 a-1 under natural conditions is reached in the Quyuan site (mean 635.8 t ha-1 a-1) within the backwater area (mean 582.9 t ha-1 a-1). In the Xiangjiaba site (mean 640.1 t ha-1 a-1) the maximum soil erosion of 1,115.4 t ha-1 a-1 under natural conditions is negligible lower. Compared to these erosion rates the mean soil loss under current land use is considerably lower (Xiangxi Catchment: mean 161.5 t ha-1 a-1; Backwater area: mean 166.3 t ha-1 a-1; Quyuan: mean 211.2 t ha-1 a-1; Xiangjiaba: mean 158.6 t ha-1 a-1). However, soil loss of maximum 2,662.2 t ha-1 a-1 for Xiangxi Catchment, 2,397.9 t ha-1 a-1 for the backwater area, 1,689.9 t ha-1 a-1 for Quyuan site, and 957.1 t ha-1 a-1 for Xiangjiaba site are also potentially possible.
According to the Chinese Soil Erosion Rate Standard (cf. Xu et al., 2008) almost 44 % of the area of the Xiangxi Catchment show extreme (> 80 t ha-1 a-1) soil erosion which mainly occur in the backwater area. Our results show that the Xiangxi Catchment is already highly prone to soil erosion under natural conditions. In places, the current land use in the mountainous relief of the Xiangxi Catchment still increases the potential soil erosion to an extreme high level. However, mean potential soil loss rates under current land use lie under those due to the natural disposition. This is due to the fact that the natural disposition to soil erosion does not consider the complete topography factor (LS factor), that effects the potential soil loss (R² = 0.77) by the human-influenced erosive slope length through farmland terraces. Moreover, our results indicate an urgent need of proper management and conservation decisions in order to reduce soil erosion against the background of a high land use dynamic in a region with low carrying capacity (Beattie, 2002).
Literature
Beattie, J. (2002): Dam Building, Dissent, And Development: The Emergence Of The Three Gorges Project. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 4(1): 138-158.
Behrens, T., Schmidt, K. and Scholten, T. (2008). An approach to remove uncertainties in nominal environmental covariates and soil class maps. In: Hartemink, A. E., McBratney, A. and M. de L. Mendoca-Santos (2008): Digital Soil Mapping for regions and countries with sparse soil data infrastructures. Springer.
Xu, Y., Shao, X., Kong, X.-B., Peng, J. and Y.-L. Yun (2008): Adapting the RUSLE and GIS to model soil erosion in a mountainous karst watershed, Guizhou Province, China. Environmental Monitoring Assessment, Vol. 141: 275 - 286. |
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