An approach to extracting surface supply relationships between glaciers and lakes on the Tibetan Plateau

Surface supply relationships between glaciers and lakes are needed to analyze and understand hydrological processes at regional and global scales.However,these supply relationships still cannot be extracted efficiently by existing methods.This paper proposes an automatic and efficient approach to extracting surface supply relationships between glaciers and lakes based on meltwater flow paths.The approach includes two stages:(1)identifying direct connections between objects(i.e.glaciers and lakes)based on flow direction derived from digital terrain analysis on a gridded digital elevation model(DEM)and(2)deriving all(or user-specified)kinds of surface supply relationships based on graph search.All computation-intensive steps in this approach have been parallelized;and all steps in the proposed approach have been integrated as an automatic program.Results for the Tibetan Plateau show that given outline data for glaciers and lakes and the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission DEM,the proposed approach can automatically derive diverse surface supply relationships under userspecified restrictions on the attributes of the supply route.The parallelization in the approach effectively improves the computing efficiency.The proposed approach could also be applied to developing a detailed fundamental dataset of supply relationships between glaciers and lakes for other region or period.

Integrated assessment of the supply-demand relationship of ecosystem services in the Loess Plateau during 1992-2015

Landscape alterations and ecosystem services(ES)are crucial elements that affect the socioecological development of ecologically fragile regions.To provide scientific support for the land-use planning and regional ecological restoration to achieve sustainable development goals(SDGs)in the Loess Plateau from 1992 to 2015,this study proposes an integrated assessment framework for assessing the supply-demand match and equilibrium of ES combining potential relationships between landscape alterations,ES,and sustainable development at the county and regional scales.Results show that more than 85%of local counties have a supply-demand mismatch in terms of ecosystem services.Supply-demand distributions for provisioning and supporting services were relatively balanced compared to cultural services,which were imbalanced.Although the overall supply-demand relationship is relatively balanced because of the significant influence of ecological restoration,it shows an increasing trend toward imbalance as human-land conflict is prominent in some regions.SDGs emphasize on specific ES information such as ecosystem conservation,sustainable agriculture,and urban construction.Furtherly,positive impacts from landscape dynamics can improve the supply capacity of the ES and contribute to regional sustainability.