During the last decade of the 20th century, extensive conversion in agricultural land use took place in Northeast China. The goal of this study is to ascertain its spatial distribution and regional differentiation, determine its causes, and analyze its environmental impact, Especially we attempt to elucidate how institutional constraints have facilitated the change at a time of agrarian restructuring when newly emerging free market was hybridized with the former planned economy. Information on six categories of land use was mapped from interpretation of Landsat TM images recorded in 1990,1995 and 2000. Most of land use changes took place during the first half of the decade, coinciding with abrupt and chaotic changes in government directives. Farmland was changed mainly to woodland,water body and built-up areas while woodland and grassland were converted chiefly to farmland.Spatially, the change from farmland to woodland was restricted to the west of the study area. The change from grassland to farmland took place in the grazing and farming interlocked west. These chaotic and occasionally conflicting changes were largely caused by lack of stability and consistency in agricultural land use policies promulgated. They have exerted adverse impacts on the local environment, including land degradation, increased flooding, and modified climate regime. 相似文献
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Regional Climate Model version 3
(RegCM3) is used to investigate the climate effects of land use change related to agriculture over China. The model is driven by the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecast 40-yr Re-Analysis (ERA40)data. Two sets of experiments for 15 yr (1987-2001) are conducted, one with the potential vegetation cover and the other the agricultural land use (AG). The results show that the AG effects on temperature are weak over northern China while in southern China a significant cooling is found in both winter (December-January-February) and summer (June-July-August). The mean cooling in the sub-regions of South China (SC) in winter and the sub-regions of Southeast (SE) China in summer are found to be the greatest,up to 0.5℃ and 0.8℃, respectively. In general, the change of AG leads to a decrease of annual mean temperature by 0.5-1℃ in southern China. Slight change of precipitation in western China and a decrease of precipitation in eastern China are simulated in winter, with the maximum reduction reaching -7.5% over SE. A general decrease of precipitation over northern China and an increase over southern China are simulated in summer,in particular over SE where the increase of precipitation can be up to 7.3%. The AG effects on temperature and precipitation show strong interannual variability. Comparison of the climate effects between AG and the present-day land use (LU) is also performed. In southern China, the ratio of temperature (precipitation)changes caused by AG and LU is greater than (closer to) the ratio of the number of grid cells with changed vegetation cover due to AG and LU variations. 相似文献