Shrinkage and protection of inland lakes on the regional scale: A case study of Hubei Province, China

摘要

The changes of lakes directly affect the sustainable development of regional ecological environment and social economy. Affected by the environmental changes and human activities, most of the inland lakes globally have suffered from the area shrinkage and wetland degradation. The protection and restoration of lakes have become a hot public issue. In this study, a lake spatial database of Hubei Province (China) is built to analyze the temporal-spatial dynamic change of lakes in Hubei Province from 1974 to 2014, with the analysis models of lake dynamic change rate (LDCR), lake landscape shape index (LLSI), and lake centroid shift rate (LCSR). The results are as follows: (1) Lakes in Hubei Province showed a shrinking and fragmenting trend from 1975 to 2014. The total area of lakes decreased by 23.08%, and the number of lake increased by 68.03%. (2) The value of LLSI firstly increased and then decreased after 1995, meaning that the lake disturbance degree of human activities decreased firstly and then increased. (3) The lake centroids of Hubei Province were in the Jianghan Plain and shifted to the northwest by 33.67 km from 1975 to 2014, due to the lake shrinkage was more serious in the southeastern than in the northwest. The situation of inland lakes' shrinkage and degeneration is still very severe. The national and local governments should strengthen the lake management and protection, curb the lake shrinkage and degradation, and promote the healthy and sustainable development of lakes.