Distribution Of Ecological Risk Research Articles

Response of hydrological ecosystem services to land-use change and risk assessment in Jiangxi Province, China

Water bodies provide humans with important hydrological ecosystem services (HESs), directly or indirectly. Water yield, water conservation, and soil conservation are essential to HESs. Since China's reform and opening up, and with its rapid socio-economic development, land use in Jiangxi Province has undergone drastic change, resulting in threats to the ecological environment. This paper evaluates three HESs, water yield, water conservation, and soil conservation, in Jiangxi Province based on land use and rainfall data, quantifies the impacts of different land classes on each ecosystem, predicts future land use using the patch-generating land use simulation (PLUS) model, and finally, discusses the ecological risks in the study area. The following results were obtained: (1) The HESs in the basin increased and then decreased from 2000 to 2020, and the spatial distribution of water yield and water conservation was greatly influenced by rainfall. Soil conservation was mostly consistent with the elevation distribution. (2) Over time, the overall aggregation of HESs in the study area increased. There were small differences in the effects of various land uses on water yield and water conservation, and large differences in the effects on soil conservation. (3) The distribution of ecological risks was not affected by different land use strategies, with the lower ecological risk level 1 dominating. Most risk areas were present in Ganzhou, Ji'an, Shangrao, and Jiujiang. The ecological risk from urban sprawl (US) accounted for the most significant proportion, and that from the ecological protection (EP) strategy accounted for the lowest proportion. This study provides reference for sustainable land use development and ecological risk prevention in the study area.

African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka

Reviewed by: African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka Sheila Petty (bio) African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka. Duke University Press. 2021. 336 pages. $104.95 hardcover; $27.95 paper; also available in e-book. Cajetan Iheka’s outstanding book on environmental issues in African visual culture and screen media paves the way for scholarship in African ecocritical studies. Organized into five chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics shows how, through film, video art, photography, sculpture, and other media, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. What, for Africa, Iheka asks, is the price of “the ecological footprint of media”?1 He posits that Africans “are disproportionately affected by the distribution of ecological risks” and calls for “empathetic labor” that “is nonexploitative, and is calibrated around the flourishing of various life forms in Africa and beyond.”2 Iheka’s work underscores the significance of African cultural artifacts and their centrality in ecomedia studies and provides a model for twenty-first-century ecological media studies that combine media arts, resource media, and elemental media (e.g., fire, air, water, and earth). The author’s main goal is to expose a grand narrative of global entanglements and to uncover the ecological, social, and human expense to Africa of production and consumption of global media. Iheka’s project probes the implications of resource extraction on the African continent and the ethics of presenting [End Page 204] these images to the world. His methodology constitutes an approach he calls “insightful reading,” which is contextual, located in historical and environmental frames, and allows for consideration of an image’s deep structure through holistic analysis of its cinematic properties.3 In chapter 1, Iheka is concerned with temporal entanglements, which he explores through Wanuri Kahiu’s short science fiction film Pumzi (2009) and Fabrice Monteiro’s series of photographs titled The Prophecy (2015). He argues that both media examples draw on previous African traditions and myths specific to their cultures and blend conventions of artistic genres, African philosophy, and supernatural beliefs. Although Iheka relies somewhat on the Afrofuturism discourse of Mark Dery and Alondra Nelson in this chapter, he is careful to not allow African Indigenous concerns to be overshadowed by the African American frame of Afrofuturism.4 He further asserts that both artists foreground the aesthetics of waste recycling and recuperation. Iheka regrets that Pumzi’s emancipatory thrust is overshadowed by the sacrifice the main character Asha (Kudzani Moswela) must make of her life in order to counter the death of a tree. Monteiro’s photographs foreground their constructed nature by showing extra-human African figures maneuvering through post-apocalyptic backgrounds that include oceans, junkyards, and masses of trash. The figures are clothed in nets, cables, and other objects salvaged from oceans and landfills. Iheka maintains that these artists’ works proffer a culture of hope through recycling and reuse. He further proffers that these works constitute the fruits of a shriving process on the part of the artists as they work through and past complicated traumas of racial, cultural, and global magnitude. Chapter 2 extends Iheka’s discussion of temporal networks by reading spatial interconnections in Pieter Hugo’s series of photographs titled Permanent Error (2011), which depicts recycling of electronic waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, and Franck Bieleu’s documentary film The Big Banana (2011), which documents the workings of a transnational banana plantation in Cameroon. The author takes up the issue of labor and its various entangled forms of exploited African unwaged and digital labor that enable planetary communications technology. Chapter 3 extends this theme by probing the ecological and human trauma produced by resource extraction in Nigeria (oil) and Niger (uranium). Michael Watt and Ed Kashi’s Curse of the Black Gold (2008), a collaborative work of fiction, poetry, essays, photographs, interviews, and a letter, “paints the image of a future tainted by oil toxicity” in the Niger Delta, while Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s film Arlit, deuxième Paris (Arlit: The Second Paris, 2005) depicts how extractive uranium strip mining in the town of Arlit...

Evaluating the impact of highway construction projects on landscape ecological risks in high altitude plateaus

In China and other countries, many highway projects are built in extensive and high-altitude flat areas called plateaus. However, research on how the materialisation of these projects produce a series of ecological risks in the landscape is very limited. In this research, a landscape ecological risk analysis model for high-altitude plateaus is proposed. This model is based on the pattern of land uses of the surrounding area. Our study includes buffer analysis, spatial analysis, and geostatistical analysis. We apply the model to the Qumei to Gangba highway, a highway section located in the southeast city of Shigatse at the Chinese Tibet autonomous region. Through global and local spatial autocorrelation analysis, the spatial clustering distribution of ecological risks is also explored. Overall, our study reveals the spatial heterogeneity of ecological risks and how to better mitigate them. According to a comparison of the risk changes in two stages (before and after the highway construction), the impact of highway construction on the ecological environment can be comprehensively quantified. This research will be of interest to construction practitioners seeking to minimize the impact of highway construction projects on the ecological environment. It will also inform future empirical studies in the area of environmental engineering with potential affection to the landscape in high-altitude plateaus.

Distribution, ecological risk and source identification of heavy metals in sediments from the Baiyangdian Lake, Northern China

Baiyangdian Lake (BYDL) is the largest plant-dominated freshwater wetland in the North China Plain. It plays an important role in supporting the construction of Xiongan New Area. Heavy metals contents (As, Cd, Cu, Cr, Ni, Pb, and Zn) in the sediments from BYDL are investigated to determine their spatial distribution and potential ecological risk in this study. Then the relationship and sources of contaminants were analyzed using a multivariate visual statistical analysis. The risk assessment results reveal that the surface sediments of BYDL are moderately to highly polluted by heavy metals, and the primary contaminants are Cd, Pb, and Zn. The spatial distribution of high potential risk regions mainly concentrate in the stream corridor between the east and west of the lake, and the distribution of high potential risk level of Cd, Pb, and Zn occur in a similar region. Additionally, exogenetic heavy metals are accumulated in the sediment cores within a depth of 16 cm, and their contents and risk decreased sharply with the increasing of depth. Furthermore, the results of statistical analysis implied that the Cd, Pb, and Zn in sediments are derived from industrial sources, the As and Cr from the geological process and the nutrients are from the nonpoint agricultural pollution. Overall, this study gives more information about the ecological risk distribution and pollution sources of BYDL, which is essential for the strategic design of future pollution control and environmental remediation.