Abstract
In the 1950s and 1970s, China implemented large-scale wasteland reclamation in the Sanjiang Plain in eastern Heilongjiang Province, which expanded the area of cultivated land. Cultivated areas alter the quantity of water resources, provide the ecological requirements of river basins, and promote the ecological health of land use. In this study, the grid-based Sacramento (GSAC) model was adopted to simulate various changes in arable land, grassland, cultivated land, and deciduous coniferous forest. Quantitative analysis of the influence of cultivated land change on runoff and under dry season flow was conducted. The results showed that the GSAC model attains a high certainty coefficient in the process of simulating the daily basin discharge and reproduces the daily basin discharge process well for many years. The annual runoff increased between 5.07 and 64.05% due to the return of farmland to grassland and coniferous forest. The return of farmland to grassland greatly impacted runoff. The slope of the grassland and coniferous forest converted from farmland was negatively correlated with the discharge in the basin outlet section. The lower the gradient threshold in the scenario of returning arable land to forest or grassland, the more arable land will be replaced by grassland or deciduous coniferous forest, which could result in more water production in the watershed. Among the different change scenarios, the average flow rate of cultivated land with a slope larger than 15° was the closest to the ecological water demand of the studied watershed. The land use mode of converting cultivated land with a slope larger than 15° into grassland is expected to promote the ecological health of the watershed.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilThe study of land use/cover change (LUCC) is an important content in the field of earth surface science
Jia Jing and Shi Xiaoli took Qinhuangdao area as an example to discuss the impact of land use/cover change on regional runoff [41], and the results show that the rapid increase of cultivated land and the decrease of forest and bare land resulted in the increase of annual average runoff by 4.79%; the increase of forest land and the decrease of cultivated land and bare land resulted in a decrease of the average annual runoff by 3.32%; the urban construction land increased significantly, and the cultivated land and forest decreased, resulting in an average annual runoff increase of 2.62%
The study results of this paper show that the return of cultivated land to grassland on slopes steeper than 15◦ leads to an increase of the average annual runoff by 29%; the cultivated land being returned to deciduous coniferous forest on slopes steeper than 15◦
Summary
Introduction published maps and institutional affilThe study of land use/cover change (LUCC) is an important content in the field of earth surface science. Its impacts on the ecological environment mainly include climate [1,2,3], atmosphere [4], soil [5,6,7], hydrology [8,9,10,11], and biological [12,13] diversity. To better understand the effects of LUCC on the soil hydrological diversity at regional and global scales, research should focus on the assessment of the water cycle, ecological security patterns [10], relationship with ecological water requirements, and choices regarding land use in river basins. The LUCC research methods of hydrological effects mainly include the test watershed method, characteristic variable time series method, and hydrological model method.
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