Accurate evapotranspiration (ET) estimation is very crucial for water resource management, particularly for the arid and semi-arid region. The remote sensing-based Priestley-Taylor method (RS-PT method) can estimate ET at regional scale, using the feature space of remotely sensed land surface temperature (LST) and vegetation index (VI). This study evaluates the RS-PT feature space method over a...

In China, the arid area occupies a quarter of the total area of the land. It mainly distributes in five provinces: Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. In the arid area, oasis is the special landscape on the background of deserts. It is not only the most centralized area of human activities but also the largest area where human disturbances happen at the regional scale. Oasis c...

Tongyu County in Northeast China is highly prone to land degradation due to its fragile physical settings characterized by a flat topography, a semi-arid climate, and a shallow groundwater table. This study aims to determine the causes of land degradation through detecting the long-term trend of land cover changes. Degraded lands were mapped from satellite images recorded in 1992 and 2002. Thes...

The value of geographical information systems and remote sensing as tools for land and resource management is now widely recognised and their application well documented. Better integration of the technologies offers the potential, however, for developing more powerful and useful tools for land and resource management. This paper focuses on the integration of image data with geographical inform...

Characterization of soil water content (SWC) profiles at catchment scale has profound implications for understanding hydrological processes of the terrestrial water cycle, thereby contributing to sustainable water management and ecological restoration in arid and semi-arid regions. This study described the vertical profiles of SWC at the small catchment scale on the hilly and gully Loess Platea...

In the arid and semi-arid regions of Northeast Asia, grassland degradation has become a major environmental and economic problem, so sustainable utilization of resources is crucial in terms of not only supporting the local and animal production but also thinking about the global environment. Especially in Mongolia and North China, grassland degradation has mainly been induced by artificial fact...

A scheme for calculating soil moisture content by using routine weather data K. Z. Shang, S. G. Wang, Y. X. Ma, Z. J. Zhou, J. Y. Wang, H. L. Liu, and Y. Q. Wang Gansu Key Laboratory of Arid Climatic Change and Reducing Disaster, College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, P.R. China National Meteorological Center, CMA, Beijing 100081, P.R. China Chinese Academy of Mete...