Abstract
Changes in the land use/cover alter the Earth system processes and affect the provision of ecosystem services, posing a challenge to achieve sustainable development. In the past few decades, the Yellow River (YR) basin faced enormous social and environmental sustainability challenges associated with environmental degradation, soil erosion, vegetation restoration, and economic development, which makes it important to understand the long-term land use/cover dynamics of this region. Here, using three decades of Landsat imagery (17,080 images) and incorporating physiography data, we developed an effective annual land use/cover mapping framework and provided a set of 90 m resolution continuous annual land use/cover maps of the YR basin from 1986 to 2018 based on the Google Earth Engine and the Classification and Regression Trees algorithm. The independent random sampling validations based on the field surveys (640 points) and Google Earth (3456 points) indicated that the overall accuracy of these maps is 78.3% and 80.0%, respectively. The analysis of the land system of the YR basin showed that this region presents complex temporal and spatial changes, and the main change patterns include no change or little change, cropland loss and urban expansion, grassland restoration, increase in orchard and terrace, and increase in forest during the entire study period. The major land use/cover change has occurred in the transitions from forests, grasslands, and croplands to the class of orchard and terrace (19.8% of all change area), which not only increase the greenness but also raised the income, suggesting that YR progress towards sustainable development goals for livelihood security, economic growth, and ecological protection. Based on these data and analysis, we can further understand the role of the land system in the mutual feedback between society and the environment, and provide support for ecological conservation, high-quality development, and the formulation of sustainable management policies in this basin, highlighting the importance of continuous land use/cover information for understanding the interactions between the human and natural systems.
Highlights
Introduction distributed under the terms andA long-standing global challenge for achieving sustainable development is how to satisfy the ever-growing demands of humans while maintaining the integrity of ecosystems [1]
The objectives of this study are: (1) provide a set of continuous annual land use/cover maps of the Yellow River (YR) basin; (2) analyze land use/cover dynamics, and discuss the characteristics and potential causes of land use/cover changes (LUCC); (3) evaluate the effects of environmental conservation programs such as the Grain for Green (GFG) program [25] and discover the environmental crisis that may be hidden behind LUCC
During the study time period, the dominant land use/cover class was grasslands, including the high coverage grasslands (18.8%) in the headwaters of the YR basin, the medium coverage grasslands (12.5%) in the northwestern part of the study area, and the arid low coverage grasslands (11.6%) in the middle of the Loess Plateau (Figure 3a,b). This was followed by agricultural lands, which were mainly distributed on the plains and hillsides bordering the plains, with croplands and orchard and terrace accounting for 14.78% and
Summary
A long-standing global challenge for achieving sustainable development is how to satisfy the ever-growing demands of humans while maintaining the integrity of ecosystems [1]. Land use/cover is an important source of information to understand the complex interaction between human activities and the ecological environment [2], which is both conditions of the Creative Commons. As the growing global population and more requires of forestry and agricultural products, the intense land use/cover changes (LUCC) driven by human activities will further intensify, which will put tremendous pressure on the structure and function of ecosystems as well as the provision of ecosystem services [8,9]. A better understanding of the long-term gradual changes in land use/cover is critical to advance our knowledge of global sustainability and the coupled human-nature system
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