Changes in Water Resources Systems:
Methodologies to Maintain Water Security and Ensure Integrated Management
(Proceedings of Symposium HS3006 at IUGG2007, Perugia, July 2007). IAHS Publ. 315, 2007, 215-220
A
review of soil water resource research and application in China
JUN XIA1,2, XINGYAO PAN1,3, XIYUN CHEN1 & YU LIU1,3
1 Key Laboratory of Water Cycle & Related Surface Process, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China
jxia_mail@263.net
2 State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
3 Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, China
Abstract With the rapid development of the economy, the conflict between
agriculture and other water users becomes serious, especially in the water
shortage regions. Soil water is the connection of surface water and
groundwater. It is of great significance in the formation, transformation and
consumption of water resources, and has a close relationship with agriculture,
hydrology and the environment. Thus, research on soil water resources have drawn
more and more attention and made great progress. This article reviews the
research on the concepts, and characteristics of the soil water resource, as
well as the relevant theories and methodologies for soil water resource
quantification, through which the importance of soil water resource research is
illustrated. It suggests that soil water should be a significant component of integrated
water resources management in China. It also indicates that, currently, soil water
resource study focuses on interdisciplinary characteristics,
estimation
of soil water resource heterogeneity, and the development of a soil water prediction
model. In future, it is essential to develop a distributed land surface model based
on remote sensing and GIS, on a large scale.
Key
words China;
research review; soil water resource