Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Effect Of Rainfall And Post-Revolutionary Land-Use Changes On Sediment Yield In Weixi Basin, Yunnan, China : New Insights From Multi-Temporal Land-Use Classification And Radionuclide Analyses, Yue Qiu

Honors Papers

This paper looks at the dynamic interphase connecting post-revolutionary politics, modern land use practices, precipitation patterns, basin slope, and sediment yield records in Weixi basin, a small mountainous watershed in Southwestern China with a total upstream area of 198 m2. The goal is to identify what processes, climatic or not, account for the changes in local sediment yield and erosion budget. Weixi basin has an average annual sediment yield of 175 ton/km2 with two anomalously large peaks in 1979 and 1984. Precipitation is moderately correlated with sediment yield at interannual scale. It also affects seasonal fluctuations in sediment yield as …