Key Laboratory for City Cluster Environmental Safety and Green Development of the Ministry of Education, School of Ecology, Environment and Resources, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, China.
Key Laboratory for City Cluster Environmental Safety and Green Development of the Ministry of Education, School of Ecology, Environment and Resources, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, China; Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, 511458, China.
J Environ Manage. 2022 Feb 1;303:114065. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.114065. Epub 2021 Nov 22.
Due to insufficient understanding of human-water interaction, many water-related problems arise in watersheds, posing severe threats to the sustainability of watershed development. Although water environmental carrying capacity (WECC) is a powerful tool to support sustainable development of watersheds, few studies considered aquatic ecological factors and uncertainty in indicator values, leading to losses of sample information in the evaluation of WECC. This paper developed a systematic framework for comprehensive WECC assessment that included the indicator system and a novel variable fuzzy pattern recognition (VFPR) approach. The WECC index system incorporated aquatic ecological factors, and addressed uncertainties associated with the indicator values. The proposed VFPR-based assessment model could realize successive evaluation to retain more original information of the sample and distinguish similar result values by treating the sample as having a continuous degree of membership instead of the traditional point form. In addition, it could be more adaptable to various circumstances including extreme cases, and closely reflect the impacts of indicator changes on the results. The established evaluation framework has been applied to Dongjiang River Basin in Guangdong Province. The spatial differences and main influencing factors of WECC in the study area were analyzed. Results show that 50% and 16.7% of the sub-regions in the study area would be subject to a poor level of WECC under pessimistic and optimistic circumstances, respectively. WECCs in the upper and lower reaches are the best and worst, respectively, which is in line with the levels of economic development in the Dongjiang River Basin. The proposed method can also be applicable to many other problems involving numerous indicators.
由于对人水相互作用的认识不足，流域出现了许多与水相关的问题，对流域的可持续发展构成了严重威胁。尽管水环境承载力（WECC）是支持流域可持续发展的有力工具，但很少有研究考虑水生生态因素和指标值的不确定性，导致在 WECC 评价中损失了样本信息。本文提出了一种系统的综合 WECC 评估框架，包括指标体系和一种新颖的变权模糊模式识别（VFPR）方法。该 WECC 指数系统纳入了水生生态因素，并解决了与指标值相关的不确定性。所提出的基于 VFPR 的评估模型可以实现连续评估，通过将样本视为具有连续隶属度而不是传统的点形式，保留更多样本的原始信息，并区分相似的结果值。此外，它可以更适应各种情况，包括极端情况，并更紧密地反映指标变化对结果的影响。所建立的评价框架已应用于广东省东江流域。分析了研究区域 WECC 的空间差异和主要影响因素。结果表明，在悲观和乐观情况下，研究区域分别有 50%和 16.7%的子区域将面临较差的 WECC 水平。上下游的 WECC 分别是最好和最差的，这与东江流域的经济发展水平一致。该方法还可适用于许多涉及大量指标的其他问题。
