Characteristics of Changes in Urban Land Use and Efficiency Evaluation in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau from 1990 to 2020

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Abstract

The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau has seen decades of changes in land use/cover as a result of urbanization and regional planning policy. Research on the efficiency of social development aids in the pursuit of social and environmental sustainability. Based on CLUD and socioeconomic statistical data, this study systematically analyses the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of urban land use in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau and evaluates its social development efficiency from three perspectives—the holistic, the municipal, and urban hierarchy—by using indicators such as the Moran index, land use efficiency, and urban expansion speed and proportion. Results show that the urbanization rate climbed from 21.26% to 54.95%, and the area of urban lands increased from 201.93 km2 to 796.59 km2 from 1990 to 2020, with urban lands expanding from the Lanzhou–Xining City Area to the central and south of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. The holistic urban land use efficiency grew from 1.14 to 1.53, while the UPD decreased slightly from 1.44 to 1.31, and the UED increased steadily from 1.40 to 12.97 per decade. Moreover, we should pay attention to the rational allocation of land in human, social and ecosystem terms to comprehensively improve the quality of urbanization across the plateau.

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Spatiotemporal characteristics, patterns, and causes of land-use changes in China since the late 1980s

Jia Ning, Yuanwei Qin, Wancun Zhou … (2014)

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The impacts of climate change and human activities on biogeochemical cycles on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.

Huai Chen, Qiuan Zhu, Changhui Peng … (2013)

With a pace of about twice the observed rate of global warming, the temperature on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (Earth's 'third pole') has increased by 0.2 °C per decade over the past 50 years, which results in significant permafrost thawing and glacier retreat. Our review suggested that warming enhanced net primary production and soil respiration, decreased methane (CH(4)) emissions from wetlands and increased CH(4) consumption of meadows, but might increase CH(4) emissions from lakes. Warming-induced permafrost thawing and glaciers melting would also result in substantial emission of old carbon dioxide (CO(2)) and CH(4). Nitrous oxide (N(2)O) emission was not stimulated by warming itself, but might be slightly enhanced by wetting. However, there are many uncertainties in such biogeochemical cycles under climate change. Human activities (e.g. grazing, land cover changes) further modified the biogeochemical cycles and amplified such uncertainties on the plateau. If the projected warming and wetting continues, the future biogeochemical cycles will be more complicated. So facing research in this field is an ongoing challenge of integrating field observations with process-based ecosystem models to predict the impacts of future climate change and human activities at various temporal and spatial scales. To reduce the uncertainties and to improve the precision of the predictions of the impacts of climate change and human activities on biogeochemical cycles, efforts should focus on conducting more field observation studies, integrating data within improved models, and developing new knowledge about coupling among carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus biogeochemical cycles as well as about the role of microbes in these cycles. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.