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Reduced sediment transport in the Yellow River due to anthropogenic changes

Nature Geoscience volume 9, pages 38–41 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

The erosion, transport and redeposition of sediments shape the Earth’s surface, and affect the structure and function of ecosystems and society1,2. The Yellow River was once the world’s largest carrier of fluvial sediment, but its sediment load has decreased by approximately 90% over the past 60 years3. The decline in sediment load is due to changes in water discharge and sediment concentration, which are both influenced by regional climate change and human activities. Here we use an attribution approach to analyse 60 years of runoff and sediment load observations from the traverse of the Yellow River over China’s Loess Plateau — the source of nearly 90% of its sediment load. We find that landscape engineering, terracing and the construction of check dams and reservoirs were the primary factors driving reduction in sediment load from the 1970s to 1990s, but large-scale vegetation restoration projects have also reduced soil erosion from the 1990s onwards. We suggest that, as the ability of existing dams and reservoirs to trap sediments declines in the future, erosion rates on the Loess Plateau will increasingly control the Yellow River’s sediment load.

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Figure 1: Location of the Loess Plateau (LP) and the Yellow River (YR) basin and the hydrologic regime of the YR in recent decades.
Figure 2: Decreases in the sediment load of the YR from the LP during recent decades.
Figure 3: The proportional decrease rate of the sediment flux (S) and its drivers.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41390464, 41401027) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. GJHZ 1502). We thank J. Gash for his assistance with the English language editing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China

    Shuai Wang, Bojie Fu, Yihe Lü, Xiaoming Feng & Yafeng Wang

  2. Joint Center for Global Change Studies, Beijing 100875, China

    Shuai Wang, Bojie Fu, Yihe Lü, Xiaoming Feng & Yafeng Wang

  3. College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

    Shilong Piao

  4. Laboratory of Alpine Ecology and Biodiversity, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

    Shilong Piao

  5. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, CEA CNRS UVSQ, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Philippe Ciais

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  1. Shuai Wang
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Contributions

B.F., S.W. and S.P. designed the research. S.W., S.P. and P.C. performed the Sediment Identity analysis. Y.L. and S.W. performed trend analysis. S.W. and X.F. performed vegetation effects analysis. S.W. and Y.W. analysed the effects of engineering measures. All authors contributed to the interpretation and writing.

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Correspondence to Bojie Fu.

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Wang, S., Fu, B., Piao, S. et al. Reduced sediment transport in the Yellow River due to anthropogenic changes. Nature Geosci 9, 38–41 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2602

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