Solving the mystery of vanishing rivers in China

Yichu Wang; Jinren Ni; Yao Yue; Jiaye Li; Alistair G L Borthwick; Ximing Cai; An Xue; Li Li; Guangqian Wang

doi:10.1093/nsr/nwz022

Solving the mystery of vanishing rivers in China

Natl Sci Rev. 2019 Nov;6(6):1239-1246. doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwz022. Epub 2019 Feb 11.

Authors

Yichu Wang^{1

2}, Jinren Ni^{1

3}, Yao Yue⁴, Jiaye Li⁵, Alistair G L Borthwick⁶, Ximing Cai⁷, An Xue¹, Li Li¹, Guangqian Wang³

Affiliations

¹ The Key Laboratory of Water and Sediment Sciences, Ministry of Education, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
² Beijing Innovation Center for Engineering Science and Advanced Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Plateau Ecology and Agriculture, Qinghai University, Xining 810016, China.
⁴ School of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
⁶ School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, UK.
⁷ Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Lab, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana IL 61801, UK.

Abstract

A major controversy was sparked worldwide by a recent national water census claiming that the number of Chinese rivers with watersheds ≥100 km² was less than half the previous estimate of 50 000 rivers, which also stimulates debates on the potential causes and consequences. Here, we estimated the number of rivers in terms of stream-segmentation characteristics described by Horton, Strahler and Shreve stream-order rules, as well as their mixed mode for named rivers recorded in the Encyclopedia of Rivers and Lakes in China. As a result, the number of 'vanishing rivers' has been found to be highly relevant to statistical specifications in addition to the erroneous inclusion of pseudo-rivers primarily generated in arid or frost-thaw areas. The modified Horton stream-order scheme reasonably depicts the configuration of complete natural streams from headwater to destination, while the Strahler largely projects the fragmentation of the named river networks associated with human aggregation to the hierarchical river systems.

Keywords: river network; stream segmentation; stream-order rules; vanishing rivers.