Influences of Land-Use Change on Water Fluxes in the Xilin River Catchment, Inner Mongolia

Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen

Asian, and especially Chinese, grassland ecosystems are threatened by desertification since population and stocking rates have been growing rapidly in recent decades. This study intended to find an appropriate land use within the Xilin River watershed in Inner Mongolia, China, to sustain the ecological balance and secure peoples' lives.

Normative land-use scenarios were created to predict the influence of different land-use changes in the water cycle in the Xilin River basin. One scenario assumed that environmental protection will increase and another assumed that agricultural production will rise to a maximum. Scenarios were analyzed with the SWAT model (Soil and Water Assessment Tool, U.S. Department of Agriculture) and ArcGIS Desktop 9.2.

The map shows the current land use of the Xilin river basin under different grazing intensities. As heaviest degradation is occurring around farms and villages, different grazing intensities were delineated by buffering rural settlements (1 km buffer threshold). In the next step, this map was joined with the current land-use map derived from Landsat 5 to produce the final land-use distribution. The current land use of the watershed was modeled with SWAT. The results were used to compare results from the other scenarios. The map was generated from data compiled by the MAGIM project (matter fluxes in grasslands of Inner Mongolia as influenced by stocking rate) funded by the German Research Foundation.

Courtesy of Johanna Schäfer.

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