Past anthropogenic land use change caused a  regime shift of the fluvial response to Holocene  climate change in the Chinese Loess Plateau

Chen, Hao; Wang, Xianyan; Yu, Yanyan; Lu, Huayu; Van Balen, Ronald

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-12-163-2024

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-12-163-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-12-163-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

Research article

|

18 Jan 2024

Research article |

| 18 Jan 2024

Past anthropogenic land use change caused a regime shift of the fluvial response to Holocene climate change in the Chinese Loess Plateau

Hao Chen, Xianyan Wang, Yanyan Yu, Huayu Lu, and Ronald Van Balen

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-12-163-2024-supplement

Data sets

The KK10 Anthropogenic Land Cover Change scenario for the preindustrial Holocene J. O. Kaplan and K. M. Krumhardt https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.871369

landlab/landlab: Mrs. Weasley (v2.0.1) E. Hutton et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3776837

bpbond/Biome-BGC B. Bond-Lamberty https://github.com/bpbond/Biome-BGC

Short summary

The Wei River catchment, one of the centers of the agricultural revolution in China, has experienced intense land use changes since 6000 BCE. This makes it an ideal place to study the response of river systems to anthropogenic land use change. Modeling results show the sensitivity of discharge and sediment yield to climate change increased abruptly when the agricultural land area exceeded a threshold at around 1000 BCE. This regime shift in the fluvial catchment led to a large sediment pulse.