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Balancing green and grain trade

Since 1999, China's Grain for Green project has greatly increased the vegetation cover on the Loess Plateau. Now that erosion levels have returned to historic values, vegetation should be maintained but not expanded further as planned.

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Figure 1: Annual sediment discharge of the Yellow River over the past 4,000 years.
Figure 2: Vegetation coverage on the Loess Plateau from remote sensing data.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology fund.

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Correspondence to Yiping Chen or Xinhua He.

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Chen, Y., Wang, K., Lin, Y. et al. Balancing green and grain trade. Nature Geosci 8, 739–741 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2544

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