Effect of ecological construction on sediment connectivity in a typical small watershed on Loess Plateau

In recent years, the significantly decrease of water and sediment in the Yellow River has attracted wide attention from domestic and foreign scholars. The Loess Plateau is the main source of sediment in the Yellow River, which ecological environment changes caused by large-scale ecological construction measures is considered as one of the main factors affecting the water and sediment changes in the Yellow River. In this study, the Wangmaogou small watershed in Loess Plateau was taken as the study area. On the basis of summing up the process of ecological construction in Wangmaogou watershed, and restoring the topography before ecological construction by topographic map, we set up four scenarios of ecological construction to analyzed the characteristics of sediment connectivity under different ecological construction scenarios and the effects of ecological construction on sediment connectivity, which are before ecological construction, only slope measures are built, only channel measures are constructed, and at the same time slope measures and channel measures are constructed. Under the same ecological construction scenario, the index of sediment connectivity (IC) of the basin shows a decreasing trend from ridge to gully, which mean the connectivity of the sediment at the ridge is less than that at the gully, and the gully are more prone to occur soil erosion than ridge. The distributed of large amount of construction land in the middle and lower reaches at the main gully of Wangmaogou small watershed reduces the connectivity of their surrounding sediment, and the region is prone to occur sediment deposition. Eco-construction measures have decreased significantly the sediment connectivity index (p<0.01) of Wangmaogou small watershed, and reduced the occurrence of soil erosion. Laying ecological measures lessened the possibility of local soil erosion, and increased the resistance of sediment in the transport process. Compared with the situation without ecological control, the mean of D_up index decreased by 75.27% by laying slope and gully measures, while the mean of D_up index decreased by only 6.45% by laying gully measures.