Abstract
The Yellow River delta (YRD) is regarded as one of the most rapid sedimentation deltas in the worldwide and the youngest land in China. Existing studies more focused on evolutions of river mouth region, thus provided limited knowledge on the evolution of the entire YRD and its corresponding trajectories of shrinkage and expansion. Here, we used 1984–2018 Landsat images and the change detection analysis algorithm to track annual area change trajectories of present YRD with the help of Google Earth Engine cloud platform. Results showed that entire YRD area documented a significantly shrinking trend with slope of –18.5 km2/decade ( p p p < 0.01). Their mean coast erosion distance ranged from 2 to 4 km in 1984–2018. Area changes in the two regions contributed more to shrinkage of entire YRD. Besides, the expanding rate of current river mouth region was gradually slowdown due to decreases of sediment discharges, although area of new river mouth was still seemingly expanding. The significantly shrinking phenomena of the present YRD should be paid more attention.
Highlights
A NTHROPOGENIC activities and climate change have strongly affected global environment and terrestrial ecosystems at least from the second half of the 19th centuryManuscript received May 25, 2020; revised July 29, 2020 and September 4, 2020; accepted September 15, 2020
The large-area expanding phenomena were mainly observed in the river mouth region, but large-area shrinking regions were mainly found in the northern (DGH subregion) and southeastern muddy coasts
The expansion in the river mouth region (QSG subregion) can be regarded as the characteristics of two periods according to the northeastward diversion of the delta lobe main channel after 1996
Summary
A NTHROPOGENIC activities and climate change have strongly affected global environment and terrestrial ecosystems at least from the second half of the 19th century. A lot of attentions have been paid to track the dynamics of the present YRD river mouth, where the expansion occurred sharply [10]–[12], and reported the continuous area expanding trend in present river mouth [8], [13]. Except for the impacts from anthropogenic activities, natural factors, especially runoff, and sediment amount changes from the Loess Plateau were largely responsible for the evolution dynamics of the YRD. A clearer picture, which comprehensively exhibits the evolution of the entire YRD and its corresponding trajectories of shrinkage and expansion, is very urgent Such detailed information will likely help to improve our. LIU et al.: SATELLITE-OBSERVED EVOLUTION DYNAMICS OF THE YELLOW RIVER DELTA IN 1984–2018 understanding for the development and sustainable protection of the present YRD. We explained the anthropogenic and natural reasons, which potentially led to annual YRD area changes
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