Quantitative Study About Environmental Science And Its Contribution

[Hortense Malovich]

Thankyou for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Climate change has been a topic of worldwide concern in recent years. Precipitation is the most active parameter of all the meteorological elements. A large number of studies show that precipitation exhibits change in many areas1,2. Precipitation change caused by the anomalous change of atmospheric circulation is a very complicated phenomenon, which is primarily the result of internal adjustment of the atmosphere itself. However, in terms of the regional scale, the terrestrial environment will respond to precipitation change through land-atmosphere interactions. It should be noted that, to some extent, terrestrial environment impact is comparable to atmospheric circulation and solar radiation.

The terrestrial environment primarily includes natural (vegetation coverage, vegetation type, terrain and terrestrial ecosystem type) and social (human activities) factors. Vegetation coverage impacts the climate through its effect on surface albedo3, etc. Compared to surrounding areas, the ground vegetation properties in the region, such as surface albedo, roughness and soil humidity, have a large variation that would influence local thermal and moisture conditions. This, in turn, changes local precipitation through atmospheric circulation on a small to medium scale. Previous research showed that precipitation can increase4,5,6 with the growth of forest coverage. Different vegetation types also have distinct impacts on the surrounding climate7. For example, a coniferous broad-leaved forest and its analogues have a greater impact than other vegetation types on the change of the average annual precipitation trend8. The terrain will affect the entire atmosphere precipitation system9. The slope, altitude, latitude and other similar factors will directly affect the precipitation by changing the regional atmospheric circulation10,11. The terrestrial ecosystem influences the concentration of greenhouse gases and aerosols in the atmosphere, thus affecting climate change through the energy balance between the ground and the atmosphere, the interaction of water vapor exchange and the biogeochemical cycle12. At the same time, the ecosystem would respond to the climate change13,14, namely, both climate interactions have mutual effects. Human activities, such as agricultural irrigation15,16,17,18,19,20,21 and urbanization22,23, directly or indirectly exert some impact on the precipitation distribution by changing regional underlying surface hydrothermal conditions to affect atmospheric circulation. For example, urbanization in Guangzhou accounts for 44.7% of the significant precipitation growth since 199124; irrigation increases precipitation while decreasing the daily average and maximum air temperatures25,26.

Most of the aforementioned researches have analyzed the change in the characteristics, temporal-spatial trends and impact factors of precipitation (climate) in a certain area27,28,29,30,31,32,33; however, these researches are lacking quantitative analysis on the combined effects of multiple important factors under a unified analysis framework. Based on the spatial variation theory, the geographical detector model34 was used initially for evaluating the relationship between health and suspicious pathogenic factors. It can measure the spatial consistency and statistical significance between health risk and geographical elements and determine the effectiveness of the spatial correlation without many assumptions. It also effectively overcomes the limitations of processing category variables that exist in the traditional statistical analysis method35. Thus, the application of the geographical detector model has been gradually extended to other areas, such as resources and the environment35,36,37,38,39,40,41, for quantitative analysis of the mutual relationship between the factor and result variables42,43. It should be mentioned that the geographical detector model has never been utilized to provide an analysis framework in order to study precipitation change.

Among the terrestrial environmental factors, the PD,H value of FCRC is the maximum. Obviously, there is a large break in sorted PD,H values between PDC and VT. The PD,H values of FCRC, URC, GDPC, FRC and PDC are in a group with high values and small differences, while the rest of the factors belong to another group with lower values. In a general sense, if the PD,H value of a factor is larger than 0.2(20%), then the factor can be regarded as a leading factor39 that strongly explains the spatial pattern. Therefore, FCRC, URC, GDPC, FRC and PDC are potential leading factors that may exert the largest impact on precipitation change (spatial pattern) in this study area. In contrast, the values of VT, DEM, GT, GRD, ASP, LUCC and TET are comparatively small at less than 0.1(10%), which likely reflects their smaller contributions to the precipitation trend (spatial pattern).

The ecological detector (Table 2) shows the differences of the PD,H values. Among the five potential leading factors (FCRC, URC, GDPC, FRC and PDC), approximately 80% of them (FCRC, URC, GDPC and PDC) are not statistically significant with each other, whereas statistically significant differences between FRC and other potential leading factors (URC and GDPC) were found. That is, URC and GDPC have a larger significant effect on the precipitation change than FRC. With the factor detector and the ecological detector, we concluded that FCRC, URC, GDPC and PDC are leading factors, and FRC was eliminated from the potential leading factors. Therefore, FCRC, URC, GDPC and PDC have the largest contribution to the precipitation change, whereas the remaining factors have a relatively weak influence.

In view of the above considerations, we also found that the power of social factors is much larger than that of natural factors in changing precipitation in the study area. This can be seen from the leading factors (FCRC, URC, GDPC and PDC) and whole sorting of the PD,H values, which means that people are likely to be a very powerful factor in changing the terrestrial environment to influence local precipitation on a regional scale.

On the surface, FCRC is the first leading natural factor. However, the increase of forest coverage rate change in the study area is predominantly due to ecological construction for tourism and sustainable development in recent years. The forest coverage rate change of this study area is higher than the rate of other places in China and occurs in a sustainable growth manner. The Shiwan Dashan National Forest Park and the Daming Mountain National Natural Reserve are located in this research area. Some research has already highlighted that the significant role of precipitation may increase or decrease alongside afforestation4,5,6 or deforestation.

The Guangxi Beibu Gulf Economic Zone is the first international regional economic cooperation zone in China. According to the statistics, the population of this region was 15.81 million in 1985 and rose by 43 percent to 22.68 million in 2010. The GDP of this region increased from 8.3 billion Yuan (RMB) to 412.1 trillion Yuan (RMB) between 1985 and 2010, which is a huge growth of 49.37 times the initial GDP. With the sustainable growth of population and the increasing development of the economy, the GDP, the population density, urbanization, construction activities, energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions have experienced a relatively rapid growth in the Beibu Gulf Economic Zone, and among them, the GDP growth rate is the largest.

The Beibu Gulf Economic Zone is a relatively small area, which is on a small scale compared to the majority of research on precipitation. In the region, the DEM, geomorphic type, slope aspect, gradient, ecosystem and vegetation form are similar or experience less change, so they probably have a weak effect on precipitation change.

The interaction detector was used to check whether or not two factors work independently. The joint impacts of two factors measured by the PD,H values are shown in Table 3 and Table S2 and can be compared with their separate impacts.

In conclusion, social factors have a larger impact on the precipitation change compared to natural factors. Partial natural factors have a relatively small impact on precipitation change but show a strong synergy with the interaction of other factors. The feedback of terrestrial environmental factors on precipitation change mainly arises from interactions of impact factors and interactive pairs of impact factors, which have a larger influence on precipitation change than the single factor does through the feedback. Interactions between factors play an important role in the precipitation change in this region.

The causes of precipitation changes are very complicated due to the interaction of the land surface with the atmosphere. In addition, the research resources, such as shared data, are limited in developing countries, creating a high demand for useful detecting and/or analyzing tools. In this study, we used geographical detectors to verify the effects of some of the natural and social factors on precipitation change at a regional scale. We believe that this program is unique because it extracts the interrelationships between precipitation change and terrestrial environmental factors using the correspondence of their spatial distribution and, most importantly, because it is easily implemented.

The feedback of terrestrial environment to precipitation changes can be partially explained by forest cover, urbanization, terrain, irrigation and other single factors. Typically, the comprehensive consequences are the result of interactions of multiple factors. In this study, we found the following:

3a8082e126