Journal article
A century-scale, human-induced ecohydrological evolution of wetlands of two large river basins in Australia (Murray) and China (Yangtze)
GR Kattel, X Dong, X Yang
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences | COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH | Published : 2016
Abstract
Recently, the provision of food and water resources of two of the world's largest river basins, the Murray and the Yangtze, has been significantly altered through widespread landscape modification. Long-term sedimentary archives, dating back for some centuries from wetlands of these river basins, reveal that rapid, basin-wide development has reduced the resilience of biological communities, resulting in considerable decline in ecosystem services, including water quality. Large-scale human disturbance to river systems, due to river regulation during the mid-20th century, has transformed the hydrology of rivers and wetlands, causing widespread modification of aquatic biological communities. Ch..
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Awarded by National Natural Science Foundation of China
Awarded by Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Funding Acknowledgements
This project was supported by a number of grants awarded to authors including the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS-President's International Fellowship Initiative for Visiting Professor to Giri R. Kattel), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 41472314 and no. 41102105 to Xuhui Dong, and Xiangdong Yang and Giri R. Kattel), the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (no. AINSEGRA11087 to) and the Australia-China Science and Research Fund (ACSRF to Giri R. Kattel). The State Key Laboratory of the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology Chinese Academy of Sciences (NI-GLAS); Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO); the Collaborative Research Network (CRN); and the Faculty of Science and Technology of Federation University Australia (FedUni) assisted collection of samples from the field and analyses at the respective laboratories. A part of this research was written at the Environmental Hydrology and Water Resources Unit of the Department of Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia. This paper was presented in Australia-China Wetland Network Research Partnership Symposium (24 March 2014) in Nanjing, China. We would like to thank the HESS Editor Giuliano Di Baldassarre, two anonymous reviewers, and the third reviewer, Tim van Emmerik from Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) for their highly constructive comments on the manuscript. Finally, Jim Sillitoe is kindly acknowledged for his editorial support.