To systematically explore land use/cover change (LUCC) trends and driving mechanisms at the large watershed scale under the background of climate change and rapid urbanization. Taking the lower reaches of the Yangtze River (LRYR) as the research object, based on the land use remote sensing monitoring data from 1980 to 2020, the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of LUCC in LRYR were analyzed by adopting the methods of land use dynamics degree (LUDD) and hotspot analysis and used geospatial detectors to quantitatively assess the intensity of the role of the land use change drivers in the LRYR. The results show that: 1) The land-use types in LRYR were dominated by arable land and woodland, accounting for more than 70% of the total area. During the study period, the construction land area increased by 11,835 km², and became the third largest land-use type in LRYR after 2010 and formed a typical urban contiguous zone along the route from Nanjing to Shanghai. 2) The land use degree comprehensive index (LUDCI) in LRYR at each stage is 270.91, 270.88, 272.22, 272.72, 274.00, 275.57, 276.93 and 280.37, respectively. LUCC in LRYR has become more dramatic, and there is significant spatial heterogeneity. Shanghai has always been a hot area of LUCC and Huangshan and Chizhou are cold spots of LUCC. 3) The driving mechanism of LUCC in LRYR can be divided into three stages. In these three stages, secondary industry output value, precipitation, and elevation are always important factors affecting LUCC. The interaction between driving factors is significant. The strongest interaction is the output value of the secondary industry ∩ precipitation, the interaction reaches above 0.6. The research results are of great significance for promoting the sustainable development of land use in this region.

Low impact development (LID) is a storm management philosophy. This paper aims at choosing the LID for urban storm management by comparing the efficiency in the south urban district in the Taiyuan Basin. Firstly, we set up a 1D–2D model to simulate the hydrological and hydraulic process of the area. Then the efficiency of different LID scenarios was analyzed by ratio of surcharging pipeline, percentage of ponding road, external outflow, infiltration, surface runoff, facility storage, and LID area ratio. It was found that the continuous porous pavement and rain garden are beneficial for use in residential and commercial settings in urban areas, and the rain garden performs more effectively and efficiently than the continuous porous pavement. The area occupied by LID might be under 20% of the impervious building area, because the LID performance was not improved significantly with the LID area when the ratio exceeded 20%. The LIDs could be more useful for small return periods and short duration storms, and could not replace conventional runoff management practices and drainage systems.

Urban flooding poses escalating threats to socioeconomic stability and human safety, exacerbated by urbanization and climate change. While urban flood resilience (UFR) has emerged as a critical framework for flood risk management, existing studies often overlook the systemic integration of post-disaster recovery capacity and multidimensional interactions in UFR assessment. This study develops a novel hazard–vulnerability–exposure–defense capacity–recovery capacity (HVEDR) framework to address research gaps. We employ a hybrid game theory combined weight method (GTCWM)-TOPSIS approach to evaluate UFR in China’s Taihu Lake Basin (TLB), a region highly vulnerable to monsoon- and typhoon-driven floods. Spanning 1999–2020, the analysis reveals three key insights: (1) weight allocation via GTCWM identifies defense capacity (0.224) and hazard (0.224) as dominant dimensions, with drainage pipeline density (0.091), flood-season precipitation (0.087), and medical capacity (0.085) ranking as the top three weighted indicators; (2) temporal trends show an overall upward trajectory in UFR, interrupted by a sharp decline in 2011 due to extreme hazard events, with Shanghai and Hangzhou exhibiting the highest UFR levels, contrasting Zhenjiang’s persistently low UFR; (3) spatial patterns reveal stronger UFR in southern and eastern areas and weaker resilience in northern and western regions. The proposed HVEDR framework and findings provide valuable insights for UFR assessments in other flood-prone basins and regions globally.

As a storm management philosophy, low impact development (LID) is used to control the surface flow and its pollution, especially in the intending urban area in China. Finding the proper LID plan to balance the cost and surface flow effect is very important for the administrators of the cities. Firstly, we combined the SWMM with NSGA II to find the Pareto set of these optimal LID plans. Then, a structural decision-making approach was used to select the proper scheme from the Pareto set. The numerical tests consisted of 40 combinations of different return periods and durations and were conducted. The result shows that the SWMM-NSGA II model is a distributed model which could be used to find the multi-objective optimization LID plans for an intending urban area. When the SDA is used to select the suitable scheme from the Pareto set composed by the optimal alternatives, the weights could reflect the management demand of people. The LIDs might be more effective for more frequent, lighter, and shorter duration storms. It could cost too much, but the control effective might not be obvious in a heavy storm.

Precipitation and incoming water are the key contributing factors to local flooding events, and analyzing the intra-annual distribution and change characteristics of precipitation and incoming water will be beneficial to the understanding of flooding contributing factors in this region. In this paper, the characteristics of intra-annual distribution of precipitation and incoming water and the synchronization of their changes in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River Basin (LYRB) from 1980 to 2020 are studied using the concentration degree and concentration period as quantitative indicators. The results are as follows: 1) the maximum precipitation occurs earlier in the year, while maximum incoming water occurs with little variation in timing but significant variation in total volume; 2) the concentration degree of both precipitation and incoming water show a slowly decreasing trend. The concentration period of precipitation is slightly advanced, and that of incoming water is significantly delayed; 3) the occurrence time and concentration period of the incoming water peak during 2010–2020 lagged behind that of precipitation, which played a role in suppressing the occurrence of floods in the LYRB. This study can provide a scientific basis for the future supply and demand of water resources in the LYRB for safe use.

The Taihu Basin is one of the most important areas which contains most of the wealthy metropolis of China. The frequent floods caused by extreme rainfall always bring economic loss and property casualties to the Taihu Basin. The backbone works of the Taihu Lake (BWTL) consisted of 11 mainstay projects are aimed at the basin management and flood control. The whole works begin in 1991, and are almost completed in 2002. We compare the two rain events in 1991 and 2016, and take two typical flood events as the case to analyse the effect of the BWTL in this paper. Due to the urbanization, more flood drains into the water body around the cities and causes the water levels of the control stations are higher than that in 1991. The BWTL changes the outlets of the flood water and improves the flood regulating capability of the Taihu Basin. Under the protect of the BWTL, even the continuous rain in 2016 brings the more serious flood than 1991, the Taihu Basin experience less flood loss.