Abstract Chinese loess-paleosol sequences have long been regarded as the continental counterpart of deep-sea sediments in terms their record Quaternary glacial–interglacial cycles. However, absolute chronologies for older than ca. 130 ka on Loess Plateau are scarce. We conducted first high-resolution luminescence dating, extending back to 350 ka, classical Luochuan loess section central Plateau...

River and the middle reaches of the Yellow River Z.C. Zhou*, Z.T. Gan, Z.P. Shangguan and Z.B Dong Department of Tourism and Environmental Sciences, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China; State Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau, Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yangling, China; Key Laboratory of Disaster Survey and Me...

Alternative land use zoning scenarios provide guidance for sustainable land use controls. This study focused on an ecologically vulnerable catchment on the Loess Plateau in China, proposed a novel land use zoning model, and generated alternative zoning solutions to satisfy the various requirements of land use stakeholders and managers. This model combined multiple zoning objectives, i.e., maxim...

Well-distributed eolian red clay in a wide area of northern China is believed to imply the onset of an ancient East Asian monsoon system since Late Miocene. Two continuous red clay sequences spanning the time interval 7-2.6 Ma and 11-2.6 Ma in the Chinese Loess Plateau was investigated to determine the magnetic orientation and grain alignment in the primary fabric of eolian sediments. The north...

The monsoon is a fundamental component of Earth's climate. The Pliocene warm period is characterized by long-term global cooling yet concurrent monsoon dynamics are poorly known. Here we present the first fully quantified and calibrated reconstructions of separate Pliocene air temperature and East Asian summer monsoon precipitation histories on the Chinese Loess Plateau through joint analysis o...

It is of great significance to dynamically simulate and forecast the development and evolutionary of soil erosion process. Traditionally, most of soil erosion models are essentially steady-state models. Thus, they have limitations at real-time simulation on the initiation and development of soil erosion process. Cellular Automata (CA), with a “from down to up” dynamic modeling framework, is cap...

Terraces are typical artificial landforms on the Loess Plateau, with ecological functions in water and soil conservation, agricultural production, and biodiversity. Recording the spatial distribution of terraces is the basis of monitoring their extent and understanding their ecological effects. The current terrace extraction method mainly relies on high-resolution imagery, but its accuracy is l...

Slope is one of a crucial terrain variables in spatial analysis and land use planning, especially in China Loess Plateau area where suffer from serious soil erosion disasters. DEM based slope extracting method has been widely accepted and applied in practice. However slope accuracy derived per this method usually does not match with their popularity. A quantitative simulation to slope data unce...

Soil bacterial communities play an important role in nutrient recycling and storage in terrestrial ecosystems. Loess soils are one of the most important soil resources for maintaining the stability of vegetation ecosystems and are mainly distributed in northwest China. Estimating the distributions and affecting factors of soil bacterial communities associated with various types of vegetation wi...

The ubiquitous occurrence of glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (GDGTs) in soils and their ability to record temperature and environmental changes offer the prospect of independently reconstructing continental paleotemperature and paleoenvironment from the loess-paleosol sequences (LPS) from the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP). In this study we present records of GDGT-derived proxies for the las...