Abstract
Precipitation and human activities are two essential forcing dynamics that influence hydrological processes. Previous research has paid more attention to either climate and streamflow or vegetation cover and streamflow, but rarely do studies focus on the impact of climate and human activities on streamflow and sediment. To investigate those impacts, the Zuli River Basin (ZRB), a typical tributary basin of the Yellow River in China, was chosen to identify the impact of precipitation and human activities on runoff and sediment discharge. A double mass curve (DMC) analysis and test methods, including accumulated variance analysis, sequential cluster, Lee-Heghnian, and moving t-test methods, were utilized to determine the abrupt change points based on data from 1956 to 2015. Correlation formulas and multiple regression methods were used to calculate the runoff and sediment discharge reduction effects of soil conservation measures and to estimate the contribution rate of precipitation and soil conservation measures to runoff and sediment discharge. Our results show that the runoff reduction effect of soil conservation measures (45%) is greater than the sediment discharge reduction effect (32%). Soil conservation measures were the main factor controlling the 74.5% and 75.0% decrease in runoff and sediment discharge, respectively. Additionally, the contribution rate of vegetation measures was higher than that of engineering measures. This study provides scientific strategies for water resource management and soil conservation planning at catchment scale to face future hydrological variability.
Highlights
Climate variability and human activity have been recognized as being important in the changes of river hydrological processes [1,2], and baseflow and sediment load are all important issues in water resource management [3,4,5], in the arid and semi-arid regions of western China.For example, Li, et al [6] chose the Wuding River Basin as a typical catchment for assessing the impact of climate variability and human activities on streamflow
The precipitation show the same change trend as runoff and sediment discharge which all decreased from 1956–1979 to
The results indicate that the abrupt change point for runoff and sediment discharge occurred in 1973
Summary
Li, et al [6] chose the Wuding River Basin as a typical catchment for assessing the impact of climate variability and human activities on streamflow. They found that the reduction of streamflow due to changes in soil conservation measures was much larger than those due to precipitation variations. Huang and Zhang [7] calculated the hydrological responses to conservation practices in the Jialuhe River catchment without considering the impact of changes in precipitation He reported that the annual surface runoff decreased by 32% due to tree plantations and that the runoff decreased. Public Health 2018, 15, 2780; doi:10.3390/ijerph15122780 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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