Assessing and managing water use is crucial for supporting sustainable river basin management and regional development. The first consistent and comprehensive assessment of sectorial water use in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) is presented by analysing homogenized annual water use data from 2000 to 2010 in relation to socio economic statistics for the same period. An abstraction of water use, usin...

Biological invasion is one of the most threatening factors for biodiversity conservation. Lacking information on alien species in certain regions of the world hampers a balanced understanding of invasion processes and efficient data exchange among stakeholders. Current knowledge gaps are in need of urgent concern. We therefore conducted a review on alien animals in Xinjiang, an unknown region o...

One of humanity's major challenges of the 21st century will be meeting future food demands on an increasingly resource constrained-planet. Global food production will have to rise by 70 percent between 2000 and 2050 to meet effective demand which poses major challenges to food production systems. Doing so without compromising environmental integrity is an even greater challenge. This study look...

Regulatory agencies and citizens have placed great emphasis on sustainability of natural resources. Individuals involved in animal husbandry should understand the basic components associated with air and water quality issues. An increase in regulations governing land, air, and water resources increases the need for educators, researchers, and producers to realize impacts of current and potentia...

We propose a mathematical nonlinear model for the Tiwanaku civilization collapse based on the assumption, supported by archeological data, that a drought caused a lack of the main resource, water. We evaluate the parameter of our model using archaeological data. According to our numerical simulation the population core should have decreased from 45,000 to 2000 inhabitants due to lake surface co...

Population growth is in general constrained by food production, which in turn depends on the access to water resources. At a country level, some populations use more water than they control because of their ability to import food and the virtual water required for its production. Here, we investigate the dependence of demographic growth on available water resources for exporting and importing n...

Riparian buffers are of major concern for land and water resource managers despite their relatively low spatial coverage. In Europe, this concern has been acknowledged by different environmental directives which recommend multi-scale monitoring (from local to regional scales). Remote sensing methods could be a cost-effective alternative to field-based monitoring, to build replicable "wall-to-wa...

The South-to-North Water Transfer (SNWT) Project of China is the largest of its kind ever implemented. Of its three routes (i.e., East, Middle and West), the middle one will transfer 14 billion m(3) of water annually from the Han River, a tributary of the Yangtze and the water supplying area, to Beijing by 2030. Thus water quality in the 95,000 km(2) upper Han River basin is of great concern. A...

Precipitation is very important to the formation of runoff, and studying of runoff variation and its response to precipitation has practical significance to sustainable utilization of water resources. The study used Mann-Kendall test, anomaly accumulation method, and precipitation elasticity of runoff method to analyze the changes in the relation of precipitation and runoff and the contribution...

For decades, the city of Windhoek in Namibia succeeded in stretching their limited potable water resources through strict water management, latterly including wastewater reclamation and direct potable reuse. An integrated approach was followed and proper policies were put in place. This was followed up with appropriate legislation, education, policing and technical and financial measures with t...