MONITORING TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL CHANGES OF LAND USE AND LAND COVER BASED ON REMOTE SENSING IN THE HILLY REGION OF CENTRAL SICHUAN BETWEEN 1989 AND 2009

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor plays a vital role in foreign trade and faces threats from water shortage and water-related hazards. An up-to-date glacial lake dataset with critical parameters is basic for water resource and flood risk research, which is absent from the corridor. This study created a glacial lake dataset in 2020 from Landsat and Sentinel images from 1990–2000, using a threshold-based mapping method. Our dataset has the potential to be widely applied.

The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake destroyed large areas of vegetation. Presently, these areas of damaged vegetation are at various stages of recovery. In this study, we present a probabilistic approach for slope stability analysis that quantitatively relates data on earthquake-damaged vegetation with slope stability in a given river basin. Presently, these recovered vegetation helped stabilize the slopes. Nevertheless, there remains potential for future slope instability in these recovered areas.

We model hydrological connectivity index (HCI) to detect the hydrologic processes changes with the landslide-damaged vegetation recovery in the Wenchuan earthquake-affected area, and the HCI results indicated that HCI obviously increased after the earthquake, and HCI decreased annually with the vegetation recovery. We consider that the lowest rainfall intensity and rainfall amount for debris flow initiation would rise up annually with HCI decreases and vegetation recovery.