Abstract
Abstract. The distribution of lakes in space and its change over time are closely related to many environmental and ecological issues, and are important factors that must be considered in human socio-economic development. In this paper, the water detection method is utilized to derive monthly water bodies, and then a seed set expansion approach was explored to extract lakes larger than 0.1 km2. Since lakes number and size can effectively reflect the distribution characteristics of water bodies, their change of the number, area and distribution are analyzed. The results shows there is a prominent power exponent relation between lake size and lake number for the Qinghai-Tibet plateau (QTP), which is similar to existing analysis of global scale. The number density of medium size of lakes on the QTP is higher than other types of lakes. The number of lakes displayed a decreasing trend from 2000 to 2015 with the R2 of 0.41. There was an increasing trend with an increasing rate of 356.86 km2/year (0.72%). Specifically, 46.54% of lakes area are increasing, and mostly distributed in Alpine grassland and shrub woodlands zone of the central Tibetan plateau. Shrinking lakes mostly with the area less than 10 km2 are situated on the woodland and shrub and grass areas in south-eastern Tibet. Finally, the analysis of monthly lake area of four lakes at the source of the Yellow River demonstrates the lakes area of each month from June to September witness an increasing trend, and the largest increasing rate is on June, which has a strong seasonality.
Highlights
Lakes, as essential components of the hydrological and biogeochemical water cycles, influence many aspects of ecology, economy, and human welfare (Liu et al, 2009, Wang et al, 1998)
In the past several decades, dramatic ecological, morphological, and areal changes of water bodies have occurred in many lakes in the world (Feng et al, 2012)
It is critical to understand the spatial-temporal patterns of areal changes as its changes can lead to flooding or drought, and water shortages, imposing significant consequences to human life, agricultural systems, global water, and food security (Feyisa et al, 2014, Hanjra et al, 2010)
Summary
As essential components of the hydrological and biogeochemical water cycles, influence many aspects of ecology, economy, and human welfare (Liu et al,, 2009, Wang et al, 1998). The analysis of lake dynamics for Central-Asia area at higher resolution such as 30m resolution or even better, primarily focused on one or multiple typical lakes (Aral Sea, Siling Co, Nam-co, Ulan ul et al) over the inconsecutive period, leading to some pseudo change (Bai et al, 2011, Chen et al, 2015, Wu et al, 2009, Yan et al, 2014) It is rare for lakes dynamics at high spatial and temporal resolution for Qinghai-Tibet plateau, which is the objective of this study analyzing monthly pattern of lakes dynamics for this area at 30m spatial resolution
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