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Mapping Water Vulnerability of the Yangtze River Basin: 1994–2013

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Abstract

A holistic understanding of the magnitude and long-term trend of water vulnerability is essential for making management decisions in a given river basin. Existing procedures to assess the spatiotemporal dynamic of water vulnerability in complex mega-scale river basins are inadequate; a new method named ensemble hydrologic assessment was proposed in this study, which allows collection of data and knowledge about many aspects of water resources to be synthesized in a useful way for vulnerability assessment. The objective of this study is to illustrate the practical utility of such an integrated approach in examining water vulnerability in the Yangtze River Basin. Overall, the results demonstrated that the ensemble hydrologic assessment model could largely explain the spatiotemporal evolution of water vulnerability. This paper improves understanding of the status and trends of water resources in the Yangtze River Basin.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Mr. Jun Wang (Director of Bureau of Hydrology, CWRC, Wuhan, China) for providing the valuable historical observed runoff data of the YRB. We are grateful to Robert Twiss (Emeritus Professor of University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco, USA) for contributing to the engaged discussions and comments, and suggestions during the preparation of this paper. The Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (no. 15DZ1203606) and the Shanghai Key Lab for Urban Ecological Processes and Eco-Restoration (no. SHUES2015B02) funded this work. The authors thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers who helped to improve this paper with their thorough review.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geographic Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, China

    Fengyun Sun

  2. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Urbanization and Ecological Restoration, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, China

    Fengyun Sun, Weining Xiang & Yue Che

  3. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Wenhui Kuang

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Sun, F., Kuang, W., Xiang, W. et al. Mapping Water Vulnerability of the Yangtze River Basin: 1994–2013. Environmental Management 58, 857–872 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-016-0756-5

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