Abstract
Approximately 90% of the sediment yield of the Yellow River is derived from the Loess Plateau. In this paper, the Loess Plateau was used as the research object. To investigate the influence of economic and social development on reducing sediment load of the Yellow River, a mathematical method was employed with hydrological and sediment data from three hydrological stations (Toudaoguai and Sanmenxia at the Yellow River, and Ganguyi at the Yan River) as well as per capita GDP data from the Yan River basin. The results showed that the reduction in runoff in the reaches between the Toudaoguai and Sanmenxia stations accounted for 39.3% of the decrease in the sediment load of the Yellow River, and the other 60.7% of the decrease may have resulted from economic and social development. Using the Yan River basin as an example, there was an inverse relationship between per capita GDP and sediment delivery during the period from 1984 to 2018. Grey relational analysis revealed a relatively high relation between the sediment load of the Yan River and the number of rural laborers transferred from the area, the afforestation area, and the tertiary industry value of Yan’an city. Thus, economic development and social transformation are highly related to sediment delivery in the basin, which may result in a decrease in sediment delivery to some extent.
Highlights
Since ancient times, the survival and development of human beings have been closely related to rivers; even most of the big cities in the world are still located along rivers [1]
The Yan River is a typical distributary of the Yellow River, which is located on the Loess Plateau and mainly belongs to the Yan’an administrative region (Figure 1)
From this research we know that crops there were grown on the hillslope the Yan River basin
Summary
The survival and development of human beings have been closely related to rivers; even most of the big cities in the world are still located along rivers [1]. As social and economic development and human activities have intensified, their impacts on river systems have become more and more obvious [3,4,5,6]. Through socioeconomic development, an increase in government investment in returning farmland to forests, and improvements of systems of soil and water conservation, resulting in land-use changes, the sediment yield in the basin has declined [22]. This paper compares the sediment load of the Yellow River between the agricultural society period (1958–1983) and the industrial society period (2004–2018) to investigate the impact of economic and social development on the sediment load of the Yellow River. One of the outcomes of this work is an ability to better understand how economic development and social transformation affect river sediment load, so as to provide references for the sustainable development of the river basin
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