Bringing ancient loess critical zones into a new era of sustainable development goals

作者：Xiaoxu Jia, Ping Zhu, Xiaorong Wei, Yuanjun Zhu, Mingbin Huang, Wei Hu, Yunqiang Wang, Tuvia Turkeltaub, Andrew Binley, Robert Horton, Mingan Shao · 发表于：Earth-Science Reviews · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1016/j.earscirev.2024.104852 · 被引用次数：23 · 研究领域：Soil erosion and sediment transport、Soil and Unsaturated Flow、Aeolian processes and effects

Critical Zone Observatories (CZOs) have been established initially in natural environments to monitor CZ processes. A new generation of CZOs has been extended to human-modified landscapes to address the impacts of climate change and human-caused actions such as erosion, droughts, floods, and water resource pollution. This review focuses on numerous plot, field, and regional scale studies conducted in the CZO facilities distributed across the China Loess Plateau (CLP). The CLP CZO features the world's largest and deepest loess deposits, highly disturbed by human activities, and consists of a longitudinal series of monitoring sites. This observation system consists of plot, slope, watershed, and regional observatories and is promoted by large-scale comprehensive experiments to achieve multiscale observations. Deep soil boreholes, hydro-geophysical tools, multiple tracers-based techniques, proximal and remote sensing techniques, and automatic monitoring equipment are implemented to monitor CZ processes. Observation and modeling of critical hydrological and biogeochemical processes (e.g., water, nutrients, carbon, and microbial activities) in land surface and deep loess deposits across CLP CZOs have unveiled crucial insights into human-environment interactions and sustainability challenges. Large-scale ecological efforts such as revegetation and engineering such as check dam construction have effectively mitigated flood and soil erosion while enhancing deep soil carbon sequestrat...