Soil erosion, policy and management in China coastal zone

Abstract

The coastal zone is very important in the world. China coastal zone was granted the first priority of developing economy in the late 1980s. Since then, high population density and rapid economic development hace caused intensive changes of LUCC in this zone. Those changes have lead to land degradation. Besides, China governments launched series of projects and policy to improve such problems. Those will inevitably cause to diverse spatial dynamics of land degradtion. However, the state of land degradation in certain time is still unknown. Soil erosion is an important indicator of land degradation.Therefore, we use RS images，RUSLE model to anlyze the spatial pattern of soil erosion for 2000. By spatial analysis, we found that soil erosion in China coastal zone is not serious. Widespread soil erosion is only occurred on coastal zones in Shandong, Hainan and werstern Guangdong Province. Although rainfall eosivity factor(R) is higher in southern coastal zone, erosion tends to occur on the slopes with lower LS values in northern coastal zone than southern coastal zone. Goevernments have enforced some policy to reduce the extent of soil erosion by conversion of farmland to woodland and barren mountains to woodland. But the difference between southern and northern coastal zone is still not realized. To improve soil eorosion in those areas, we should let governments put more funds to increase vegetation cover in north. Such study will provide helpful suggestions for governments to prevent soil erosion in coastal zone.