THE HUGE THREE-GORGES DAM (TGD) OF THE Yangtze River is going to demonstrate the mighty power of humanity to change and fragment an area of about 58,000 km2 with the formation of a huge reservoir of 1080 km2. It is expected to exert disastrous influences on many terrestrial plants and animals, as discussed by J. Wu et al. in their Policy Forum “Three-Gorges Dam— experiment in habitat fragmentat...

development throughout the world for thousands of years, providing water, controlling floods, irrigating crops, facilitating navigation, creating recreational opportunities, and generating motive power and electricity. By the end of the 20th century, about 45 000 large dams (>15 m in height) and an estimated 800 000 small dams had been built worldwide (WCD 2000), obstructing over 65% of fresh w...

It is important to understand the dynamics of malaria vectors in implementing malaria control strategies. Six villages were selected from different sections in the Three Gorges Reservoir for exploring the relationship between the climatic factors and its malaria vector density from 1997 to 2007 using the auto-regressive linear model regression method. The result indicated that both temperature ...

A review of case histories of reservoir-induced seismicity (RIS) in China shows that it mainly occurs in granitic and karst terranes. Seismicity in granitic terranes is mainly associated with pore pressure diffusion whereas in karst terranes the chemical effect of water appears to play a major role in triggering RIS. In view of the characteristic features of RIS in China, we can expect moderate...

THE THREE GORGES DAM (TGD) ACROSS THE Yangtze River is the world’s largest hydroelectric dam (1). Construction of the TGD will form many different sizes of islands, providing a golden opportunity for exploring the ways in which island ecosystems are regulated (1). However, the construction will also pose great challenges to the ecosystem of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area (TGRA). It will affect...