Using Multisource Geospatial Data to Identify Potential Wetland Rehabilitation Areas: A Pilot Study in China’s Sanjiang Plain

Wetland rehabilitation, highlighted in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is imperative for responding to decreased regional biodiversity and degraded ecosystem functions and services. Knowing where the most suitable wetland rehabilitation areas are can strengthen scientif...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Water (Basel) 2020-09, Vol.12 (9), p.2496
Main Authors: Qiu, Zhiqiang, Luo, Ling, Mao, Dehua, Du, Baojia, Feng, Kaidong, Jia, Mingming, Wang, Zongming
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural land
Agricultural management
Agricultural production
Anthropogenic factors
Biodiversity
Conservation
Datasets
Decision making
Ecosystems
Environmental protection
Floods
Geographic information systems
Geospatial data
Hydrologic data
Hydrology
Nature conservation
Regional development
Rehabilitation
Rice fields
Spatial data
Surface water
Sustainable development
Wetland management
Wetland protection
Wetlands
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Summary:Wetland rehabilitation, highlighted in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is imperative for responding to decreased regional biodiversity and degraded ecosystem functions and services. Knowing where the most suitable wetland rehabilitation areas are can strengthen scientific planning and decision-making for natural wetland conservation and management implementation. Therefore, we integrated multisource geospatial data characterizing hydrological, topographical, management, and policy factors, including maximum surface water coverage, farming time, anthropogenic disturbance, and wetland protection level, to identify potential wetland rehabilitation areas in the Sanjiang Plain (SJP), the largest marsh distribution and a hotspot wetland loss region in China. Our results indicate that a total of 11,643 km2 of wetlands were converted into croplands for agricultural production from 1990 to 2018. We estimated that 5415 km2 of the croplands were suitable for wetland rehabilitation in the SJP, of which 4193 km2 (77%) have high rehabilitation priority. Specifically, 63% of the potential areas available for wetland rehabilitation are dry croplands (3419 km2), the rest (37%) being paddy fields. We argue that the selected indicators and approach used in this study to determine potential wetland rehabilitation areas could guide their investigation, at either the provincial or national scale and would be beneficial to conservation and sustainable management of wetlands in the SJP.
ISSN:2073-4441
2073-4441
DOI:10.3390/w12092496