Recent declines in China’s largest freshwater lake: trend or regime shift?
By Yuanbo Liu, Guiping Wu, Xiaosong Zhao. 2013
182 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Poyang Lake is China’s largest freshwater lake with a high degree of spatio-temporal variation. The lake has shrunk in size in recent years, resulting in significant hydrological, ecological and economic consequences. It remains unknown whether the shrinkage is a trend or a regime shift, which is of high importance for policymakers as it may lead to different decisions. This study constructed a four-decade record of the lake area using multi-temporal satellite images and hydrological data. The Mann–Kendall analysis revealed a decreasing trend of Poyang Lake but it was statistically insignificant. The Rodionov sequential approach disclosed an abrupt change of the lake in 2006, implying a regime shift. Basically, the lake change was a synthetic result of precipitation, evapotranspiration and outflow discharge. However, precipitation and outflow did not show any significant trend or abrupt change, and evapotranspiration had an increasing trend in addition to an abrupt change in 1998. The trigger for the recent lake declines was principally ascribed to a weakened blocking effect of the Yangtze River. The findings provide an example of hydrologic non-stationarity and are valuable for effective promotion of climate adaptation and water resource management.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a90d5785b42f48afd83a47c388437bfe296cb128
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Downstream Yangtze River levels impacted by Three Gorges Dam (2013, background): “…and (iii) the change of inundation level/area of individual lakes in the riparian zone and their water exchange with the Yangtze main stem (Hayashi et al 2008, Dai et al 2010, Feng et al 2011, Huang et al 2011, Zhao et al 2011, Feng et al 2012, Guo et al 2012, Lai et al 2012, Liu et al 2013).”