A furrow runs through it: An example of sustainable traditional irrigation in Western Cape Province,South Africa     

H. A. P. Smit  J. A. Jacobs 《GeoJournal》2004,61(2):191-196

Water and water related matters are important issues in water scarce countries like the Republic of South Africa. This is especially true for the agricultural sector that relies heavily on the availability of water for irrigation to ensure a secure food supply. In South Africa, present day irrigation projects rely on government subsidies and are usually large undertakings beyond the reach of individuals or small communities. The sustainability of such large irrigation projects is still a matter of debate. A 100 years ago a different set of rules applied. Irrigation could only be achieved by hand-dug furrows that supplied water in relatively small quantities to small farming communities. This paper investigated such a small community, the Leeukloof farming community in the Western Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa. For the past 93 years this community has maintained a furrow that supplies water not only to farms bordering the Perdeberg River, which supplies the furrow with water, but also to farms not bordering the river. The authors try to reconstruct the changes in agricultural practices brought about by the furrow, methods of water extraction during each phase, as well as the development and role of the furrow system. The perception by the community of the necessity of this method of water extraction from the river system is also investigated. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.  相似文献   

Minority women’s microenterprises in rural areas of the United States of America: African American,Hispanic American and Native American case studies     

Helen Ruth Aspaas 《GeoJournal》2004,61(3):281-289

Women in many rural areas of the US often engage in small-scale businesses as one of several avenues for contributing to household incomes. In those geographical areas that contain a significant minority population, many of the women's businesses display the cultural diversity of the regions in which they live. Likewise, women's roles as economic providers as well as wives and mothers are reflected in the manner in which they operate their businesses. Candida Brush suggests that women's strategies for operating their businesses are highly integrative because women's business decisions are intertwined with familial responsibilities, household economic demands and desires to contribute to their communities. Hispanic and Native American women in the Four Corners region of southwestern US and African American women in central Virginia participated in interviews in which they responded to numerous short answer and open-ended questions about their businesses and decision-making strategies. From these interviews an image emerges of rural minority business women who are operating their businesses at the nexus of family obligations, economic necessities, cultural ties and with a commitment for serving their communities. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.  相似文献   

Relationship between solar radiation and the development and morphology of small cirque glaciers (Maladeta Mountain massif, Central Pyrenees, Spain)     

Javier Chueca  Asunción Julián 《Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography》2004,86(1):81-89

Abstract Spatial and temporal variations in radiative fluxes influence glacier mass‐balance in mountain areas. The primary goal of this study was to assess differences in solar radiation on three glacial cirques located in the Maladeta Mountain massif (Central Spanish Pyrenees), and analyse their implications on glacier development and morphology. A quantitative approach is adopted to obtain the values of solar radiation (direct, diffuse and global radiation), combining several field data parameters (measured at 55 control‐points) with the solar radiation modelling package Ecosim. The data obtained confirm that the morphologies of the glacial bodies developed in the three cirques have a good correlation with the spatial variation on solar radiation inputs, favouring also the conservation (Aneto and Coronas cirques) or total vanishing (Llosás cirque) of the glacial remnants analysed here. The study shows how strongly in this Alpine‐Mediterranean context solar radiation — firstly as a function of latitude and time of year, and locally as a function of topographic slope, aspect and shadowing — controls the mass‐balance and the spatial distribution of melting in small glaciers, having an effect on the development of their morphologies.  相似文献   

Modelling the spatial and temporal distribution of rainfall: a case study in the wet and dry tropics of North East Australia     

A.K.L. Johnson 《The Australian geographer》2004,35(1):39-57

Rainfall regimes with strong spatial and temporal variation are characteristic of many coastal regions of north and eastern Australia. In coastal regions of north eastern Australia, regimes vary considerably over short distances. This occurs because of changes in local topography, including the height and orientation of mountain ranges and the direction of the coastline with respect to the prevailing moist south east air stream. Northern Australia experiences a tropical monsoon climate with rainfall occurring predominantly during the summer months. Areas with a closer proximity to the coast typically experience the heavier rainfalls. While networks of rainfall gauges have been established and continuous records are available for most of these stations from the 1890s, their low distribution density relative to the complexity of rainfall pattern they are required to represent means that there remains a poor understanding of the spatial and temporal distribution of rainfall in the wet tropics. An enhanced knowledge of rainfall distribution in both space and time has the potential to deliver significant economic and environmental benefits to managers of natural resources. This paper reports on the application of a technique for estimating mean annual and mean monthly rainfall across the Herbert River catchment of north east Australia's dry and wet tropics. The technique utilises thin plate smoothing splines to incorporate both location and elevation into estimates of rainfall distribution. We demonstrate that the method can be applied successfully at the meso scale and within the domain of routinely available data. As such, the method has broad relevance for decision making.  相似文献   

Controlling factors of gullying in the Maracujá Catchment,southeastern Brazil     

L. de A. P. Bacellar  A. L. Coelho Netto  W. A. Lacerda 《地球表面变化过程与地形》2005,30(11):1369-1385

Hundreds of gullies (‘voçorocas’) of huge dimensions (up to 400–500 m long, 150 m wide and 50 m deep) are very common in the small Maracujá Catchment in southeastern Brazil. These erosional features, which occur with an uneven intensity throughout the area, started due to bad soil management practices at the beginning of European settlement, at the end of the 17th century, and nowadays are still evolving, but at a slower rate. As surface soils are usually very resistant to erosion, the outcrop of the more erodible basement saprolites seems to be an essential condition for their beginning. An analysis of well known erosion controlling factors was performed, aiming to explain the beginning and evolution of these gullies and to understand the reasons for their spatial distribution. Data shows that geology and, mainly, geomorphology are the main controlling factors, since gullies tend to be concentrated in basement rock areas with lower relief (domain 2) of Maracujá Catchment, mainly at the fringes of broad and flat interfluves. At the detailed scale (1:10 000), gullies are more common in amphitheatre‐like headwater hollows that frequently represent upper Quaternary gullies (paleogullies), which demonstrate the recurrence of channel erosion. So, gullies occur in areas of thicker saprolites (domain 2), in places with a natural concentration of surface and underground water (hollows). Saprolites of the preserved, non‐eroded hollows are usually pressurized (confined aquifer) due to a thick seal of Quaternary clay layer, in a similar configuration to the ones found in hollows of mass movement (mudflow) sites in southeastern Brazil. Therefore, the erosion of the resistant soils by human activities, such as road cuts and trenches (‘valos’), or their mobilization by mudflow movements, seem to be likely mechanisms of gullying initiation. Afterwards, gullies evolve by a combination of surface and underground processes, such as wash and tunnel erosion and falls and slumps of gully walls. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.  相似文献   

关于数字化记录中前兆信号的分析   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

王亮 《地震地磁观测与研究》2005,(Z1)

介绍了如何用MATLAB工具软件—小波分析的基本理论对数字信号进行数字滤波,着重分析和研究了呼和浩特地震台形变观测资料出现各种信号,提出了小波分析理论对台站实际工作的重要性。  相似文献   

小动力旋挖钻机用嵌岩短螺旋钻头结构形式的改进          下载免费PDF全文

刘南昌  胡继良  黄玉文  翁炜  张宏智 《探矿工程》2005,32(2):43-43,46

采用小动力无加压旋挖钻机在粒径较大的卵砾石地层和泥页岩地层中进行1500 mm以上大口径钻孔灌注桩施工，由于钻机动力小且不能加压，用常规嵌岩短螺旋钻头钻进出现进尺慢或不进尺现象。通过对河南西峡县宛西制药责任有限公司新厂房桩孔施工过程中出现此种现象的分析和处理，提出了嵌岩短螺旋钻头针对性的改进措施，并取得了良好效果。  相似文献   

Test of a distributed modelling approach to predict flood flows in the karst Suoimuoi catchment in Vietnam     

Y. B. Liu  O. Batelaan  F. De. Smedt  N. T. Huong  V. T. Tam 《Environmental Geology》2005,48(7):931-940

The major obstacles for modelling flood processes in karst areas are a lack of understanding and model representations of the distinctive features and processes associated with runoff generation and often a paucity of field data. In this study, a distributed flood-modelling approach, WetSpa, is modified and applied to simulate the hydrological features and processes in the karst Suoimuoi catchment in northwest Vietnam. With input of topography, land use and soil types in a GIS format, the model is calibrated based on 15 months of hourly meteorological and hydrological data, and is used to simulate both fast surface and conduit flows, and groundwater discharges from karst and non-karst aquifers. Considerable variability in the simulation accuracy is found among storm events and within the catchment. The simulation results show that the model is able to represent reasonably well the stormflows generated by rainfall events in the study catchment.  相似文献   

Urban stormwater thermal gene expression models for protection of sensitive receiving streams          下载免费PDF全文

A.M.A. Sattar  B. Gharabaghi  F. Sabouri  A.M. Thompson 《水文研究》2017,31(13):2330-2348

Thermal impact of typical high‐density residential, industrial, and commercial land uses is a major concern for the health of aquatic life in urban watersheds, especially in smaller, cold, and cool‐water streams. This is the first study of its kind that provides simple easy‐to‐use equations, developed using gene expression programming (GEP) that can guide the assessment and the design of urban stormwater management systems to protect thermally sensitive receiving streams. We developed 3 GEP models using data collected during 3 years (2009–2011) from 4 urban catchments; the first GEP model predicts event mean temperature at the inlet of the pond; the second model predicts the stormwater temperature at the outlet of the pond; and the third model predicts the temperature of the stormwater after flowing through a cooling trench and before discharging to the receiving stream. The new models have high correlation coefficients of 0.90–0.94 and low prediction uncertainty of less than 4% of the median value of the predicted runoff temperatures. Sensitivity analysis shows that climatic factors have the highest influence on the thermal enrichment followed by the catchment characteristics and the key design variables of the stormwater pond and the cooling trench. The general method presented here is easily transferable to other regions of the world (but not necessarily the exact equations developed here); also through sensitivity and parametric analysis, we gained insight on the key factors and their relative importance in modelling thermal enrichment of urban stromwater runoff.  相似文献   

海绵城市建设下的生态效应分析——以常德市穿紫河流域为例     

王夏青  孙思远  杨萍  邹小燕  易巧梅  彭保发  许建伟 《地理学报》2019,74(10):2123-2135

海绵城市建设被认为是解决城市内涝、水污染和水资源短缺、热岛效应等问题的有效途径之一。中国自2015年起共确立30个海绵城市建设试点城区,为今后海绵城市建设在全国范围的推广提供示范。基于实地调研、查阅资料并对比分析穿紫河流域海绵城市建设前后的水文、植被和气候等自然要素变化。结果表明：常德市城市内涝有效缓解,但在暴雨发生时局部仍出现积水和内涝现象;穿紫河水质总体上由劣Ⅴ类转变为Ⅲ类,但在冬季周期性恶化及污染物富集;穿紫河流域生物多样性显著增加,同时也表现出植物种类单一、具有环境净化功能的植物种类较少、生态系统不完整和管理不善等问题;常德市夏季的热岛效应有一定程度缓解。常德市2004-2019年的海绵城市建设显著提升了穿紫河流域的生态效应,为该地区的社会经济发展和人居环境改善提供了重要的生态基础,也为合理评价其他试点城区海绵城市建设效果提供借鉴。  相似文献