Huaiyong SHAO^1,2,*, Xiaofei SUN¹, Shiqi TAO¹, Zhiying XIANG¹ & Wei XIAN^3
1Key Laboratory of Geoscience Spatial Information Technology( Ministry of Land and Resources of the P.R.China),College of Earth Sciences, Chengdu University of technology, Chengdu 610059, Sichuan, China
²Center for Global Change and Earth Observations, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48823, USA
³College of Resources and Environment, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, Sichuan, China
^* Corresponding author: Huaiyong SHAO. E-mail addresses: huaiyongshao@163.com

ENVIRONMENTAL VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT IN MIDDLE-UPPER REACHES OF DADU RIVER WATERSHED USING PROJECTION PURSUIT MODEL AND GIS

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The middle-upper reaches of Dadu River Watershed are located in the transitional zone between Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and western hilly area of Sichuan Basin. This transitional zone is an important ecological barrier of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. However, the innate vulnerability of the environment combined with the unreasonable development and utilization of hydropower, forestry, agriculture and grassland resources lead to prominent eco-environmental problems in this area. In order to analyze environmental problems in the study area, based on the selected environmental vulnerability indicators (including elevation, slope, vegetation coverage, land use, soil type, precipitation, temperature, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and population), this paper integrates Projection Pursuit Model (PPM) and Geography Information System (GIS) to quantitatively evaluate the environmental vulnerability in the middle-upper reaches of Dadu River Watershed in both 2000 and 2010. According to the evaluation results, the environmental vulnerability of the study area is divided into five grades, namely, potential vulnerability, slight vulnerability, light vulnerability, moderate vulnerability, and high vulnerability. On the whole, the environmental vulnerability of the study area is at the moderate level, and exhibits obvious vertical distribution characteristics. Meanwhile, the environmental vulnerability changes show a trend of generally improved and partially deteriorated for the past 10 years (from 2000 to 2010) in the study area. Besides, the driving forces of the environmental vulnerability changes are discussed and analyzed. The general improvement of the study area environment mainly benefits from the carrying-out of the environmental protection policies such as “Natural Forests Protection” and “Grain-for-Green”. And the primary reasons that cause local environment of the study area worse are over-exploitation of hydropower and mineral resources. At the end of this paper, according to the environmental vulnerability classification results, specific suggestions were proposed for regional environmental protection.