Conversion of Blue Water into Green Water for Improving Utilization Ratio of Water Resources in Degraded Karst Areas

作者：Ke Chen, Shengtian Yang, Changsen Zhao, Zongli Li, Ya Luo, Zhiwei Wang, Xiaolin Liu, Yabing Guan, Juan Bai, Qiuwen Zhou, Xinyi Yu · 发表于：Water · 年份：2016 · DOI：10.3390/w8120569 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Hydrology and Watershed Management Studies、Soil and Unsaturated Flow、Climate change and permafrost

Vegetation deterioration and soil loss are the main causes of more precipitation leakages and surface water shortages in degraded karst areas. In order to improve the utilization of water resources in such regions, water storage engineering has been considered; however, site selection and cost associated with the special karstic geological structure have made this difficult. According to the principle of the Soil Plant Atmosphere Continuum, increasing both vegetation cover and soil thickness would change water cycle process, resulting in a transformation from leaked blue water (liquid form) into green water (gas or saturated water form) for terrestrial plant ecosystems, thereby improving the utilization of water resources. Using the Soil Vegetation Atmosphere Transfer model and the geographical distributed approach, this study simulated the conversion from leaked blue water (leakage) into green water in the environs of Guiyang, a typical degraded karst area. The primary results were as follows: (1) Green water in the area accounted for <50% of precipitation, well below the world average of 65%; (2) Vegetation growth played an important role in converting leakage into green water; however, once it increased to 56%, its contribution to reducing leakage decreased sharply; (3) Increasing soil thickness by 20 cm converted the leakage considerably. The order of leakage reduction under different precipitation scenarios was dry year > normal year > rainy year. Thus, increase...