TITLE:
The Evolution of a Karst Rocky Desertification Land Ecosystem and Its Driving Forces in the Houzhaihe Area, China
AUTHORS:
Yangbing Li, Jing Xie, Guangjie Luo, Hua Yang, Shijie Wang
KEYWORDS:
Karst Rocky Desertification, Evolution, Driving Mechanism, Central Plateau in Guizhou
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Ecology,
Vol.5 No.10,
October
16,
2015
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.