Abstract
Understanding the evolution of karst rocky desertification (KRD) quantitatively is essential to obtain objective knowledge about the concept of KRD and the form reason of KRD, and is useful to restore KRD land. Houzhaihe area located in central plateau in Guizhou Province was studied here as a representative assemblage landform and its KRD’ s evolution and driving factors were studied, based mainly on high-resolution remote sensing image in 1963, 1978, 2005 and 2010. The KRD land comprises light KRD, moderate KRD and severe KRD. The results demonstrated that the evolution process of KRD can be divided into four modes such as unchanged, weakened, fluctuated and aggravated in the study area. The KRD with no changes from 1963 to 2010, namely, unchanged mode, accounted for 43.76% of the total area of the KRD in 2010; it distributed in the area with the slope of 15° - 25° and >25° basically. Furthermore, the severe KRD distributed mainly in the areas within 300 - 600 m distance from settlement; when the distance away from the rural settlements was more than 900 m, the severe KRD declined, and its proportion was 28.6% and 10.6% in 1963 and 2010 respectively. In the peak-cluster depressions, located in central study area, the slope cropland with slope of 15° - 25° was still abounding, and was seriously rocky desertification generally. So, we propose that the existence of a large number of slope croplands is still the major driving factor of land rocky desertification. Therefore, for the rocky desertification control, the authors consider that the focal point is to alter the land use of steep-slope cropland at present.
Highlights
Most of karst landscapes are recognized as fragile zones unsuitable as human habitats—mainly due to extremely poor soil cover, or a complete lack of soil, and rapid water loss [1]
There are no obvious change of area proportions of NKRD and severe KRD (SKRD) in study area in 1963, 1978, 2005 and 2010 (Figure 4)
The Karst rocky desertification (KRD) distributed in gentle slope cropland in Houshan village accounts for 41.91% of MKRD, the KRD distributed in gentle-slope cropland in Yuyangzhai village accounts for 58.02% of MKRD and 26.34% of SKRD while the KRD distributed in gentle-slope cropland of other village is not serious
Summary
Most of karst landscapes are recognized as fragile zones unsuitable as human habitats—mainly due to extremely poor soil cover, or a complete lack of soil, and rapid water loss [1]. Karst rocky desertification (KRD) land refers to a land degradation process, due to the human interference causing continued vegetation degradation, soil and water loss and even loss of resources, land productivity decline, and bedrock exposed similar to that in a desert landscape, in the vulnerable karst ecological environment in south humid regions of China [6] [7]. Some problems about KRD research still exist, such as the controversy on how to determine and classify the KRD [18] [19], the lack of typical evolution case study of KRD with the application of a long-time series of high-resolution images [20], the neglect of the relationship among KRD, the people’s behavior and government policy [21] [22]. We attempt to reveal the KRD evolution rule and driving mechanism through the typical case studies based on a long-time series of high-resolution images. Our purpose is aimed at providing some help for understanding KRD and its evolution process, the driving causes, and the effective measures for handling KRD through our study results
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