A Novel Approach for Monitoring the Ecoenvironment of Alpine Wetlands using Big Geospatial Data and Cloud Computing

Abstract

Alpine wetlands in western Sichuan plateau (WSCP) are located on the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP), where the ecological environment is very sensitive to global climate change. Being naturally driven coupled with unreasonable human development activities, alpine wetlands have experienced serious ecological and environmental issues such as drought, inversion, and desertification. However, due to the limitations of data sources and calculation models, it is impossible for us to deeply understand the change mechanism and spatial difference of the ecological environment of the alpine wetland (EEAW) in previous studies. In view of this, an innovative approach for monitoring the EEAW change has been proposed in this paper. We employ the approach to perform the EEAW change trend analysis, and some meaningful characteristics were founded. Specifically, it includes the fol1owing aspects. The air temperature increase is relatively significant, while the precipitation change has obvious spatial differentiation, and even some region’s precipitation experienced a decrease especially in plot1. In Haizishan, Lugu Lake, and Bari Lake, we explored an interesting phenomenon that the precipitation increases first and then decrease, and the turning point occurred around 1999. Increases in air temperature and evaporation have aggravated the drought in high-latitude areas. The drought situation has been alleviated in high-altitude areas due to the acceleration of snow melt water. Wetland vegetation and biomass presented an overall increasing trend, but the degradation also occurs in some area, including Zoige and Lugu Lake area. The human activity disturbances of wetland degradation mainly include the settlements expansion, agricultural development, and the ecotourism prosperity. Among them, targeted poverty alleviation projects have accelerated the urbanization in WSCP, and the development of agriculture and tourism has increased the interference of wetlands. Additionally, we have used Landsat images and national wetland survey data (1999, 2013, and 2020 year) from the past two decades to verify the EEAW trend and confirm the reliability of the analysis results using this approach.