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Arid Land Geography ›› 2025, Vol. 48 ›› Issue (11): 1893-1902.doi: 10.12118/j.issn.1000-6060.2024.701

• Climate Change • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Spatiotemporal dynamics of potential evapotranspiration and its response to land use change on the northern slope of Tianshan Mountains from 2000 to 2021

WANG Chunyong(), LI Chaofan(), HAN Qifei   

  1. School of Geographical Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, Jiangsu, China
  • Received:2024-11-13 Revised:2024-12-30 Online:2025-11-25 Published:2025-11-26
  • Contact: LI Chaofan E-mail:Wangchunyong0108@163.com;lcf8709@163.com

Abstract:

In recent years, rapid social and economic development, coupled with the swift expansion of oasis areas and changes in land use on the northern slope of Tianshan Mountain in Xinjiang, China, has posed significant challenges to the region’s already scarce water resources. It is of great scientific importance and has significant practical value to investigate the mechanisms by which land use change influences potential evapotranspiration (PET) to understand regional hydrological processes and effectively managing water resources. This study uses PET and land use data from 2000 to 2021 for the northern slope of Tianshan Mountains to examine the Spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of PET and the impact of land use change on PET through Theil-Sen Median (Sen) trend analysis and Mann-Kendall (M-K) test methods. The findings indicate that: (1) From 2000 to 2021, the annual PET on the northern slope of Tianshan Mountains showed an overall increasing trend, with a spatial variation pattern of gradual increase from the foothills of Tianshan to the north. (2) Examining the impact of land use type changes alone, the upward trend in annual PET in areas where grassland has been converted to cultivated land (average rate: 0.21 mm·a-1) was significantly lower than the downward trend in annual PET in areas in which unused land was converted to cultivated land (average rate: -1.11 mm·a-1). (3) Climate change has a more significant impact on the annual PET of the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains than land use change. The influence of climate change on annual PET is 77.13% and 46.26% higher than that caused by the conversion of grassland to cropland and unused land to cropland, respectively.

Key words: potential evapotranspiration, land use, spatiotemporal characteristics, northern slope of Tianshan Mountains