Land desertification and some proposals for promoting sustainable development in qinghai lake area, china

Qinghai Lake is situated in northeast of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, where the Yellow river and the Yangtze River source regions are located. These regions are praised as "the resources bank of biological species" and "China\´s water tower". But now, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is suffering from ongoing land desertification and Qinghai Lake area is the most severely place among these regions. Based on field investigation and land desertification classification, applied remote sensing image processing software system ARC/INFOR and ARCVIEW, and utilized a 1: 50,000 land-use map of this area, two phases Landsat TM/ETM remote sensing data obtained in 1986 and 2005 were compared in this paper. Studies show that ecological environment in Qinghai Lake area is in continued deterioration. Land desertification is developing rapidly and desertified land is expanding at an annual rate of 2.72%. Land desertification in this area have been caused by warming and drying climate, rat-caused damages and the damages from pest, unreasonable human activity such as irrational constructing of infrastructure, improper grassland management, etc. The eco-environmental deterioration has resulted in negative influence to local society and economy, such as sharply decreased livestock carrying capacity, lowered living standard, more and more ecological refugee, serious social problems, etc. Such critical problems urge the authors to search for approaches of ecological alleviation in the Qinghai Lake area. So the following countermeasures are put forward: to implement ecology emigrating project and set up ecological compensative mechanism; to carry out restoration of grassland eco-system by eliminating rat and pest-caused damages; to establish scientific research bases for developing and spreading new-high applicable technologies; to establish the management system so as to make reasonable use of the grassland.