Facing the eco-environmental construction on the Loess Plateau, especially the vegeta-tion restoration in the semiarid areas, as well as the dam system engineering construction that is about to start, how can the vegetation restoration gain the optimum ecological benefits following the improvement of the preservation rates of trees and grass on the basis of guaranteeing water storage and silt trapping effects? What techniques should be taken to restore vegetation? These questions critical to environmental management on the Loess Plateau have to be settled urgently. According to the different macroscopic spatial distribution patterns of forest and grass on the Loess Plateau, this paper analyzes the macroscopic hillslope and gully management relationship in the middle Yellow River and weight of natural and human factors in erosion-induced sediment yield in the context of environmental background of the major silt producing areas. In light of the current status of the inte-grated management of small watersheds and soil and water conservation measure arrangement schemes of hillslopes and gullies on the Loess Plateau, this paper discusses the impact of vegetation restoration on gully erosion induced sediment yield and the effect of vegetation caused sediment re-duction. Studies indicate that there exists an erosional environmental background related to the natural and human activities in the sediment yield peak values of the sandy and coarse sandy areas in the middle Yellow River, sediment yield modulus is closely related to the synthetic effect of environ-mental elements, and the rainstorms, reclamation rate and forest coverage are the main factors af-fecting sediment yield modulus in the sandy and coarse sandy areas. The key to control soil erosion in the sandy and coarse sandy areas is the conversion of farmland into forestland and grassland, the reduction of reclamation rate and the increase of tree and grass vegetation. Small catchment man-agement should adhere to the principle of simultaneous control of hillslop
According to the characteristics of water and erosion environments of different natural zones on the Loess Plateau, this paper studies changes of vegetation types, distribution boundaries of forest and grass as well as restoration capacity of vegetation in different natural zones in the middle Yellow River. The annual precipitation of 530 mm is the critical annual pre-cipitation for forest and grass distribution in the middle Yellow River. Among the zonal and azonal environmental factors affecting watershed sediment yield, the intermediate diameter D50 (mm) of suspended load and forest coverage (V, %) play the leading role. Of them the effect weight of forest coverage (V, %) on catchments sediment yield is only 3.4% less than the role of the intermediate diameter (D50, mm), they are almost the same. To effectively control soil erosion in semiarid, especially in hilly-gullied areas and make sediment transport modulus reduce to less than 6000 t/km2, it is rather difficult by merely relying on natural restoration of forest. In the process of cultivated land conversion into forest land and grassland, measures suiting local conditions should be adopted in tree species selection and artificial afforestation (grass planting) based on management with biological measures for slopeland and engineering measures for hilly-gullied areas, so that watershed forest coverage in key counties can reach at least over 30%.Compared with the standard period of precipitation prior to the 1960s, with the decrease of an-nual precipitation at various periods, plant productivities decline to different degrees under natural conditions. The main reason accountable for the low survival rate of new seedlings and grass over years is due to precipitation decrease. In light with regression models of annual pre-cipitation and natural vegetation productivities, it is possible to obtain estimated values of wa-tershed natural vegetation productivity and eco-water consumption needed for the restoration to the standard period respectively for the presen
CHEN Hao1, ZHOU Jinxing2, CAI Qiangguo1, YUE Zhongqi3, LU Zhongchen4, LIANG Guanglin1& HUANG Jianguo5 1. Key Laboratory of Water Cycle and Related Land Surface Processes, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Re-search, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
