Drastic change in China's lakes and reservoirs over the past decades.

ABSTRACT: Using remote sensing images, we provided the first complete picture of freshwater bodies in mainland China. We mapped 89,700 reservoirs, covering about 26,870 km(2) and approximately 185,000 lakes with a surface area of about 82,232 km(2). Despite relatively small surface area, the total estimated storage capacity of reservoirs (794 km(3)) is triple that of lakes (268 km(3)). Further analysis indicates that reservoir construction has made the river systems strongly regulated: only 6% of the assessed river basins are free-flowing; 20% of assessed river basins have enough cumulative reservoir capacity to store more than the entire annual river flow. Despite the existence of 2,721 lakes greater than 1 km(2), we found that about 50 lakes greater than km(2) have formed on the Tibetan Plateau re

SUBMITTER: Yang X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4131217 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature