China Geology (Jun 2021)
Remote sensing-based dynamic monitoring and environmental change of wetlands in southern Mongolian Plateau in 2000–2018
Abstract
The environmental change in the wetlands in the southern Mongolian Plateau has important impacts on the environment of North China and even the entire Northeast Asia, from which the global climate change can be understood on a large scale, especially the climate change in the Mongolian Plateau. This study extracted the information on the wetlands from three stages of remote sensing images (also referred to as RS images) of the study area, including Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images of 2000, TM images of 2010, and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images of 2018. As indicated by the extraction results, the area of wetlands decreased from 796.90 km2 of 2000 to 666.24 km2 of 2018 at a rate of 7.26 km2/a. The reduced area is 130.66 km2, which is about 16.4% reduction. And the patch number of wetlands decreased from 731 of 2000 to 316 of 2018 in the study area, approximately 56.8% reduction (415 patches), and the decrease in the area of the wetlands mainly occurred in the northwest endorheic region. In terms of wetland types, the change of the wetlands was dominated by the decrease of lacustrine wetlands, of which the area and patch number decreased by 106.2 km2 and 242, respectively. Furthermore, the area of the lacustrine wetlands decreased at the highest rate of 8.70 km2/a in 2010–2018. From the perspective of spatial distribution, the wetlands in the western part shrunk more notably than those in the eastern part as a whole in the study area. According to local meteorological data, the precipitation gently decreased and the temperature increased (about 1.7°C) from 1975–2018. Overall, the decrease in the area of the wetlands and the temperature rises in the study area were mainly driven by the Mongolian monsoon climate, reduction in precipitation, and human activities.
