The Tarim basin is a unique ecosystem. The water from the Tarim River supports both wildlife and humans. To analyze the effects of both land use and climate changes on groundwater, a research site was established at Yingibazar, which is a river oasis along the middle section of the Tarim River. A hydrological survey was performed to assess the general water cycle in this area with special empha...

Snow in the mountainous watersheds of the Tarim River Basin is the primary source of water for western China. The Snow Cover Daily L3 Global 500-m Grid (MOD10A1) remote sensing dataset has proven extremely valuable for monitoring the changing snow cover patterns over large spatial areas; however, inherent uncertainty associated with large sensor zenith angles (SZAs) has called its reliability i...

Oasis stability in the lower reaches of the Tarim River was assessed at the landscape scale (including changes in landscape pattern and land use in the oasis) and at the regional scale (including the cold-island effect and NDVI of the oasis) based on the methods of landscape ecology, GIS and Remote Sensing (RS). Thematic Mapping (TM) remote sensing images from 1990, 2000 and 2009 were employed ...

Water resources availability for meeting reservoir storage, water supply diversion, and environmental instream flow requirements must be assessed based on various premises regarding future water uses as well as climatic and hydrological conditions. This study, therefore, investigates the possible association between climate change and water resources variability, and detects the plausible long-...

Starting from the existing analysis of runoff from the Hotan River, the varying cause of runoff in the Hotan River is analyzed using the annual runoff accumulated curves and the orderly cluster method, pointing out that the runoff from the Hotan River coming from the mountains falls into the natural runoff with the fluctuations because of being subject to climate changes. It is worth noticing t...

To restore declining species, including Populus euphratica and other riparian communities, in the river ecosystem of the lower Tarim River, the ecological water conveyance project (EWCP), as a part of an integrated water resource management plan, was implemented in 2000. The EWCP aims to schedule and manage the water resources in the upper reaches and transfer water to the lower reaches by a se...

Population genetic information can provide valuable insight for the conservation and management of threatened and endangered plant species. Tamarix taklamakanensis is an endangered shrub endemic to arid basins of northwestern China. This species serves to stabilize soils in this region, but has seen substantial loss in its abundance due to depletion of ground water. The populations of this spec...

We found that the most suitable flooding disturbance model for regenerating Populus euphratica forest was two to three times per year with a duration of 15-20 days and an intensity of 25-30 m(3)/s. The flooding should take place during the seed emergence to young tree growth stages, and should be based on flooding experiments and data from vegetation quadrats and ecological water conveyance. Fu...

Glacial retreat on the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding regions is characteristic since the 1960s and has intensified in the past 10 yr. The magnitude of glacial retreat is relatively small in the interior of the Tibetan Plateau and increases to the margins of the plateau, with the greatest retreat around the edges. Glacial retreat in this region is impacting the hydrological processes in the Ti...

Understanding runoff generation and dynamics is the basis for water resource management, while water isotopic ratios are a potential tool for studying the mechanism on a large scale. In this paper, spatial variations of δ18O and δD of river water and their sources within a large region of the Tarim River were investigated. The results showed obvious spatial variations of both water isotope valu...