Abstract
Wetland rehabilitation, highlighted in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is imperative for responding to decreased regional biodiversity and degraded ecosystem functions and services. Knowing where the most suitable wetland rehabilitation areas are can strengthen scientific planning and decision-making for natural wetland conservation and management implementation. Therefore, we integrated multisource geospatial data characterizing hydrological, topographical, management, and policy factors, including maximum surface water coverage, farming time, anthropogenic disturbance, and wetland protection level, to identify potential wetland rehabilitation areas in the Sanjiang Plain (SJP), the largest marsh distribution and a hotspot wetland loss region in China. Our results indicate that a total of 11,643 km2 of wetlands were converted into croplands for agricultural production from 1990 to 2018. We estimated that 5415 km2 of the croplands were suitable for wetland rehabilitation in the SJP, of which 4193 km2 (77%) have high rehabilitation priority. Specifically, 63% of the potential areas available for wetland rehabilitation are dry croplands (3419 km2), the rest (37%) being paddy fields. We argue that the selected indicators and approach used in this study to determine potential wetland rehabilitation areas could guide their investigation, at either the provincial or national scale and would be beneficial to conservation and sustainable management of wetlands in the SJP.
Highlights
Wetlands perform multiple ecosystem functions and services and are of great significance to sustainable development [1,2]
In work by Russell et al [11], basin topographical and land cover datasets were combined to determine potential suitability for wetland rehabilitation in the San Luis Rey River basin in southern California. As demonstrated by those studies, rehabilitation of wetlands should benefit from optimum hydrological conditions [12]
Using ArcGIS 10.6 software to perform the overlay analysis on the above five dataset layers, we could obtain the potential areas of wetland rehabilitation from croplands with differing rehabilitation were assigned as a high priority for wetland rehabilitation, and croplands in the experimental zone were assigned medium priority
Summary
Wetlands perform multiple ecosystem functions and services and are of great significance to sustainable development [1,2]. In work by Russell et al [11], basin topographical and land cover datasets were combined to determine potential suitability for wetland rehabilitation in the San Luis Rey River basin in southern California As demonstrated by those studies, rehabilitation of wetlands should benefit from optimum hydrological conditions [12]. Limited indicators were evaluated in these previous studies Both anthropogenic threats [14] and the protection level provided by nature reserves should be considered when identifying potential areas for wetland rehabilitation. With GIS, many kinds of spatial analyses can be performed, such as buffer and overlay analyses By using both RS and GIS software, multiple geospatial data can be integrated to form a system for recognizing potential areas for wetland rehabilitation. The findings will help guide the performance of a wetland rehabilitation in the SJP and provide guidance for wetland rehabilitation in other areas
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