Climatic and anthropogenic drivers of land use/cover change in fragile karst areas of southwest China since the early 1970s: a case study on the Maotiaohe watershed

Land use/cover change and its driving forces has been one of the most important fields in global environmental change research since the 1990s. Karst areas are distributed extensively on the Earth’s surface and are usually characterized by a fragile eco-environment. In southwest China, karst landforms are fully developed and their eco-environment is highly fragile. Over the past decades, irrational land use practice has caused a series of alarming eco-environmental issues including forest clearing, soil erosion, and karst rocky desertification. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to study land use/cover change in this area and its driving forces in order to re-build the damaged eco-environment and achieve sustainable land use. In this paper, the authors conduct a case study on land use/cover change and its natural and human driving forces since the early 1970s in southwest China’s Maotiaohe watershed. The results indicate that the land use/cover pattern in the study area has undergone a very complex change, which is a result of combined action of both natural and anthropological factors. In the 1970s and 1980s, climate change and fast population increase played dominating roles in the change of arable land, shrub land, grassland, and rocky desertification land. Since the early 1990s, economic development has gradually taken the place of population change to become the overwhelming human factor to go along with climate change in driving the land use/cover change, particularly the change in arable land, construction land, and rocky desertification land.