Thursday, August 6, 2009 - 9:00 AMOOS 35-4: China’s land-use change and its effects on GHG
Hanqin Tian, Mingliang Liu, Guangsheng Chen, Wei Ren, Chaoqun Lu, and Xiaofeng Xu. Auburn University
Background/Question/Methods
China has experienced a long history of intervention of human activities into the natural land ecosystems, which eventually greatly changed the land use and land cover patterns. The most intensive changes were primarily occurred during 1661 - 2005 Cropland areas were reported to increase but with fluctuations, build-up land area was reported irreversibly to increase, wetland was decreased, while grassland area was only slightly decreased but with serious degradation. In the meanwhile, the forest coverage in China has rocketed from about 8.6% in 1950 to 18.21% at present. Most of the increased forest areas were either afforested or reforested plantations. There was much research on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under land use and land cover change (LUCC) in the past 50 years either through field observation or model simulations; However, these studies either only focused on short-term changes or only concentrated on one of the GHGs (such as CO, CO2, N2O and CH4). In addition, most of previous studies focused on cropland related land use change rather than other types of land use and land cover changes, such as cropland reclamation, wetland dry-up, afforestation/reforestation, and deforestation. In this study, we made a relatively comprehensive and long-term simulation on the CO2, CH4 and N2O fluxes as resulted from land use and cover changes from 1661 to 2005 in China through using the Dynamic Land Ecosystem Model (DLEM).
China has experienced a long history of intervention of human activities into the natural land ecosystems, which eventually greatly changed the land use and land cover patterns. The most intensive changes were primarily occurred during 1661 - 2005 Cropland areas were reported to increase but with fluctuations, build-up land area was reported irreversibly to increase, wetland was decreased, while grassland area was only slightly decreased but with serious degradation. In the meanwhile, the forest coverage in China has rocketed from about 8.6% in 1950 to 18.21% at present. Most of the increased forest areas were either afforested or reforested plantations. There was much research on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under land use and land cover change (LUCC) in the past 50 years either through field observation or model simulations; However, these studies either only focused on short-term changes or only concentrated on one of the GHGs (such as CO, CO2, N2O and CH4). In addition, most of previous studies focused on cropland related land use change rather than other types of land use and land cover changes, such as cropland reclamation, wetland dry-up, afforestation/reforestation, and deforestation. In this study, we made a relatively comprehensive and long-term simulation on the CO2, CH4 and N2O fluxes as resulted from land use and cover changes from 1661 to 2005 in China through using the Dynamic Land Ecosystem Model (DLEM).
Results/Conclusions