Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cultivated land change on the climate in northern China during 2010-2030 on the
basis of simulation with WRF model. In terms of the climatic effects of past land use
change, the last part of this chapter explores the impacts of land use/cover change on
the near-surface temperature in the North China Plain in year 1992 and 2005.
4.1 Impacts of Cultivated Land Reclamation
on the Climate and Grain Production in Northeast
China in the Future 30 years
Northeast China as an important commodity grain production base in China makes
important contribution to the global food security, while the historical large-scale
cultivated land reclamation is of great importance to the formation and develop-
ment of this commodity grain production base. Northeast China currently provides
30-35 million tons of grain every year, accounting for 13 % of the national total
grain output. Besides, Northeast China as the core region of grain production of
China will undertake the tasks of making the grain output increase by 15.05 billion
kg, which will account for 30.1 % of the newly increased grain output. Therefore,
the grain production in Northeast China will have great impacts on the Asian and
even global food security (Deng et al.
2010a
).
Except for the restriction of the cultivated land area, the grain production in
Northeast China is also influenced by the climate change. The heat resource during
the growth season of crops has shown an increasing trend in Northeast China, and
the temperature has increased significantly in the past decades. For example, the
relevant research indicates that the temperature in Northeast China has increased
by 1.43 C in the past century (Sun et al.
2006
), which is two times higher than the
global average level and three times higher than the national average level. The
rapid temperature rise will surely have significant impacts on the growth of crops.
It has been widely accepted that the climate change is influenced by the human
activities (Pielke et al.
2011
), and the land use change as one of the major
approaches through which the human activities influence the climate change, has
received more and more attention (Anderson et al.
2012
). The change of the spatial
pattern of cultivated land in Northeast China will surely lead to the climate change
at local and regional scales. The historical data indicate that along with the cul-
tivated land reclamation, there has been significant climate change in Northeast
China, including the obvious change of the spatial pattern of temperature, and
precipitation. (Deng et al.
2006
).
Some of previous studies predict the climate change in the future just simply
according to history climate data and their variation trends (Peterson et al.
2002
).
It is well known that there is uncertainty in climate change and abnormal weather
always occur especially in recent decades, which made the history trend unre-
liable to represent the real one. Therefore, the shortage of this method was
obvious. For that reason, some scientists devoted to predict future climate with
