Progress has been made in the study of the changes in lake water storage in the arid region of Central Asia, where Xinjiang is located

Lake resources are a key factor for
human survival, ecosystem maintenance and sustainable economic and social development on a regional and global scale.
Central Asia is a typical arid region and the main bearing area
of the "Silk Road Economic Belt".
The specific climatic conditions in Central Asia make its ecosystems and human societies very sensitive and vulnerable
to changes in water resources.
Under the combined effect of climate change and human activities, the amount of lake water in the arid region of Central Asia has changed significantly
.
However, at present, there is a relative lack of systematic monitoring of the dynamic changes of lake water storage in Central Asia, which makes the dynamic changes of lake water storage and its response mechanism to regional climate change and human activities unclear
.

In view of this problem, based on SRTM DEM elevation data and long-time series Landsat data, the team of researcher Chen Yaning of the State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, comprehensively used water index, threshold method and random forest model to construct an empirical model for estimating area-elevation-water storage changes, and systematically evaluated the long-term temporal dynamic changes of water storage in 9619 lakes in the arid region of
Central Asia.
Based on the random forest algorithm, the degree of
correlation between climate change and human activities and changes in lake water storage was quantitatively assessed.

The results show that from 1990 to 2020, the maximum and minimum water storage of Central Asian lakes decreased by 27.
94 Gt and 144.
21 Gt
respectively.
The water storage of lakes shows differences in altitude, with lakes below 3500 meters shrinking and lakes above 3500 meters expanding
.
Random forest results suggest that human activities are more important to lake water storage changes than climate change, and up to 96% of lake water storage changes can be explained
by human activities.
This study comprehensively evaluates the characteristics of lake water storage in Central Asia, and provides the latest scientific data
for alleviating the contradiction between water supply and demand and resolving transboundary water conflicts in Central Asia.

The results were published in the Journal of Hydrology under the title "Unravelling lake water storage change in Central Asia: Rapid decrease in tail-end lakes and increasing risks to water supply", and the first author of the paper is Dr.
Huang Wenjing of Xinjiang Birthplace.

The research was supported
by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Article link:

Figure 1.
Schematic diagram of the principle of lake water storage estimation

Figure 2.
Lakes of Central Asia, 1990–2020 (a) Change in maximum water storage and (b) change in minimum water storage