Abstract
Oases support 90% of the province’s inhabitants and produce more than 95% of the social wealth in Xinjiang Province of China. Oases’ dependency on water availability from mountainous regions plays a critical factor in the sustainability of agricultural practices and oasis expansion. In this study, we have chosen the Cele Oasis located in the south rim of the Taklimakan Desert, typical of oases in the region, as a case study to examine water availability. With over 97% of Cele’s economy tied to agriculture, unfettered expansion of the oasis into the desert has raised concern on water availability. A spatial and temporal analysis of water availability is performed using newly available data to determine whether agricultural production within the Cele Oasis has overexploited available water resources or if feasible expansion of agricultural production is feasible beyond its current boundary. Transferability of the methodology for assessing water availability spatially and temporally will be beneficial to other oases in the arid region that face similar concerns.
Highlights
Water is essential to the formation and sustainment of oases in arid environments (Guo et al 2016)
Agriculture drives the local economy, which in turn heightens the desire to increase production, creating a virtually endless growth cycle; water availability sets an implicit limit to unfettered expansion (Bai et al 2014; Sun et al 2019)
The appeal to increase the economic gain by expansion of oasis agricultural production diminishes oasis sustainability, thereby necessitating the determination of available water resources and their allocation (Ling et al 2013; Gao et al 2018)
Summary
Water is essential to the formation and sustainment of oases in arid environments (Guo et al 2016). 288 Page 14 of 19 approximately 24 km may be attributed to an overestimation of the 1956 bounds owing to (1) the 1956 imagery possibly overestimating a larger agricultural footprint that included interspersed land use mix of natural desert vegetation; (2) a lack of an recognizable defined crop plot structure; (3) absence of a central community core area (i.e., present day downtown Cele) that resulted in smaller village cores scattered across the oasis; and (4) a broad smattering of agricultural plots that followed a splay of bifurcated Cele River channels (the Cele canal network did not exist until 1987) mimicking a deltaic depositional pattern. A total of 36 plots (7% of total plots) met this criterion with nearly 90% clustered on the western border of Cele; these isolated plots constitute 12.4% of the land farmed in Cele and 11.7% consumptive amount of surface water demand
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