Exploring the spatial distribution of land use/cover change (LUCC) and ecosystem carbon storage under future climate change scenarios can provide the scientific basis for optimizing land resource redistribution and formulating policies for sustainable socioeconomic development. We proposed a framework that integrates the patch-generating land use simulation (PLUS) model and integrated valuation of ecosystem services and tradeoffs (InVEST) model to assess the spatiotemporal dynamic changes in LUCC and ecosystem carbon storage in Guangdong based on shared socioeconomic pathways and representative concentration pathways (SSP-RCP) scenarios provided by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6). The future simulation results showed that the distribution patterns of LUCC were similar under SSP126 and SSP245 scenarios, but the artificial surface expanded more rapidly, and the increase in forest land slowed down under the SPP245 scenario. Conversely, under the SSP585 scenario, the sharply expanded artificial surface resulted in a continuous decrease in forest land. Under the three scenarios, population, elevation, temperature, and distance to water were the highest contributing driving factors for the growth of cultivated land, forest land, grassland, and artificial surface, respectively. By 2060, the carbon storage in terrestrial ecosystems increased from 240.89 Tg in 2020 to 247.16 Tg and 243.54 Tg under SSP126 and SSP245 scenarios, respectively, of which forest ecosystem carbon storage increased by 17.65 Tg and 15.34 Tg, respectively; while it decreased to 226.54 Tg under the SSP585 scenario, and the decreased carbon storage due to forest destruction accounted for 81.05% of the total decreased carbon storage. Overall, an important recommendation from this study is that ecosystem carbon storage can be increased by controlling population and economic growth, and balancing urban expansion and ecological conservation, as well as increasing forest land area.
Identifying and extracting check dams is of great significance for soil and water conservation, agricultural management, and ecological assessment. In the Yellow River Basin, the check dam, as a system, generally comprises dam locations and dam-controlled areas. Previous research, however, has focused on dam-controlled areas and has not yet identified all elements of check dam systems. This paper presents a method for automatically identifying check dam systems from digital elevation model (DEM) and remote sensing images. We integrated deep learning and object-based image analysis (OBIA) methods to extract the dam-controlled area’s boundaries, and then extracted the location of the check dam using the hydrological analysis method. A case study in the Jiuyuangou watershed shows that the precision and recall of the proposed dam-controlled area extraction approach are 98.56% and 82.40%, respectively, and the F1 score value is 89.76%. The completeness of the extracted dam locations is 94.51%, and the correctness is 80.77%. The results show that the proposed method performs well in identifying check dam systems and can provide important basic data for the analysis of spatial layout optimization and soil and water loss assessment.