Investigating the Impacts of Landuse-landcover (LULC) Change in the Pearl River Delta Region on Water Quality in the Pearl River Estuary and Hong Kong’s Coast

Remote Sensing

Yuanzhi Zhang²  Yufei Wang²  Yunpeng Wang¹ 

[1] Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 510640 Guangzhou, Guangdong, China; E-Mail:;Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, China; E-Mails:

关键词: LULC;    water quality;    PRD;    Hong Kong;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs1041055

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Water quality information in the coastal region of Hong Kong and the Pearl River Estuary (PRE) is of great concern to the local community. Due to great landuse-landcover (LULC) changes with rapid industrialization and urbanization in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, water quality in the PRE has worsened during the last 20 years. Frequent red tide and harmful algal blooms have occurred in the estuary and its adjacent coastal waters since the 1980s and have caused important economic losses, also possibly threatening to the coastal environment, fishery, and public health in HongKong. In addition, recent literature shows that water nutrients in Victoria Harbor of Hong Kong have been proven to be strongly influenced by both the Pearl River and sewage effluent in the wet season (May to September), but it is still unclear how the PRE diluted water intrudes into Victoria Harbor. Due to the cloudy and rainy conditions in the wet season in Hong Kong, ASAR images will be used to monitor the PRE river plumes and track the intruding routes of PRE water nutrients. In this paper, we first review LULC change in the PRD and then show our preliminary results to analyze water quality spatial and temporal information from remote observations with different sensors in the coastal region and estuary. The study will also emphasizes on time series of analysis of LULC trends related to annual sediment yields and critical source areas of erosion for the PRD region since the 1980s.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2009 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland.