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Groundwater is critical to human survival, however, it has constantly been overexploited around the world. Despite hydrological causes and the effects of global climate change, groundwater governance has an essential role to play in causing or preventing such overexploitation. This paper presented a case of groundwater governance in Lijiang, renowned for its natural beauty and exotic cultures, located in northwest Yunnan, China. Since being designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in the 1990s, Lijiang has experienced dramatic tourism development, which eventually escalated its groundwater crisis. This paper applied the diagnostic approach of social-ecological systems to analyse the institutionalised governance process in the case of Lijiang and substantiated the effectiveness of the Social-Ecological Systems (SES) approach in explaining groundwater management issues. Two significant findings were drawn in the case of Lijiang. First, institutional arrangements may play an essential role in resource management, but their analysis is lacking between macro modelling of planetary boundaries of the Earth and micro surveys of individual and community behaviour. The SES framework offered a useful tool to fill this gap. Second, the designation of Lijiang's Outstanding Universal Values as a world heritage site ironically damaged its local cultural intimacy, which nurtured generations of collective action for Naxi people, escalating the tragedy of its groundwater commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2021 Yangbi Ms 6.4 earthquake in Yunnan, China, occurred in an area where the Global Positioning System (GPS) geodetic observations are particularly intensive. Based on a detailed retrospective analysis of the GPS observations of about 133 stations distributed in the proximately 400 km × 400 km region that contains the area affected by the earthquake., we obtain a high-resolution GPS velocity field and strain rate field and then derive the present-day slip rates of major faults in the region with the commonly used half-space elastic dislocation model and constraints from the GPS velocity field. Furthermore, by calculating the seismic moment accumulation and release and deficit rates in the main fault segments and combining with the distribution characteristics of small earthquakes, we evaluate the regional seismic risk. The results show that (1) there was a localized prominent strain accumulation rate around the seismogenic area of the impending Yangbi Ms 6.4 earthquake, although this was not the only area with a prominent strain rate in the whole region. (2) The seismogenic area of the earthquake was just located where the strain direction was deflected, which, together with the localized outstanding maximum shear strain and dilatation rates, provides us with important hints to determine the potential areas of future strong earthquakes. (3) Of all the seismogenic fault segments with relatively high potentials, judged using the elapsed time of historical earthquakes and effective strain accumulation rate, the middle section of the Weixi–Qiaohou fault has a higher earthquake risk than the southern section, the Midu–Binchuan section of the Chenghai fault has a higher risk than the Yongsheng section and the Jianchuan section of the Jianchuan–Qiaohou–Lijiang–Xiaojinhe fault has a higher risk than the Lijiang section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 2 January 2022, an earthquake of Ms 5.5 occurred in Ninglang County, Lijiang City, the earthquake-prone area of northwestern Yunnan. Whether this earthquake caused significant deformation and thermal anomalies and whether there is a relationship between them needs further investigation. Currently, multi-source remote sensing technology has become a powerful tool for long-time-series monitoring of earthquakes and active ruptures which mainly focuses on single crustal deformation and thermal anomaly. This study aims to reveal the crustal deformation and thermal anomaly characteristics of the Ninglang earthquake by using both Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) and Robust Satellite Techniques (RST). First, Sentinel-1A satellite SAR data were selected to obtain the coseismic deformation field based on Differential InSAR (D-InSAR), and the Small Baseline Set InSAR (SBAS-InSAR) technique was exploited to invert the pre- and post-earthquake displacement sequences. Then, RST was used to extract the thermal anomalies before and after the earthquake by using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer Land Surface Temperature (MODIS LST). The results indicate that the seismic crustal deformation is dominated by subsidence, with 23 thermal anomalies before and after the earthquake. It is speculated that the Yongning Fault in the deformation area is the main seismogenic fault of the Ninglang earthquake, which is dominated by positive fault dip-slip motion. Meanwhile, the seismic fault system composed of NE- and NW-oriented faults is an important factor in the formation of thermal anomalies, which are accompanied by changes in stress at different stages before and after the earthquake. Moreover, the crustal deformation and seismic thermal anomalies are correlated in time and space, and the active rupture activities in the region produce deformation accompanied by changes in thermal radiation. This study provides clues from remote sensing observations for analyzing the Ninglang earthquake and provides a reference for the joint application of InSAR and RST for earthquake monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lunar observation campaign was conducted using a hyper-spectral imaging spectrometer in Lijiang, China from December 2015 to February 2016. The lunar hyper-spectral images in the visible to near-infrared region (VNIR) have been obtained in different lunar phases with absolute scale established by the National Institute of Metrology (NIM), China using the lamp–plate calibration system. At the same time, the aerosol optical depth (AOD) is measured regularly by a lidar and a lunar CE318U for atmospheric characterization to provide nightly atmosphere extinction correction of lunar observations. This paper addressed the complicated data processing procedure in detail from raw images of the spectrometer into the spectral lunar irradiance in different lunar phases. The result of measurement shows that the imaging spectrometer can provide lunar irradiance with uncertainties less than 3.30% except for absorption bands. Except for strong atmosphere absorption region, the mean spectral irradiance difference between the measured irradiance and the ROLO (Robotic Lunar Observatory) model is 8.6 ± 2% over the course of the lunar observation mission. The ROLO model performs more reliable to clarify absolute and relative accuracy of lunar irradiance than that of the MT2009 model in different Sun–Moon–Earth geometry. The spectral ratio analysis of lunar irradiance shows that band-to-band variability in the ROLO model is consistent within 2%, and the consistency of the models in the lunar phase and spectrum is well analyzed and evaluated from phase dependence and phase reddening analysis respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a local environmental issue with global importance, land use/land cover change (LUCC) has always been one of the key issues in geography and environmental studies with the expansion of regional case studies. While most of LUCC studies in China have focused on urban land use change, meanwhile, compared with the rapid change of urban land use in the coastal areas of eastern China, slow but distinct rural land use changes have also occurred in the mountainous areas of western China since the late 1980s. In this case through a study in Lijiang County of Yunnan Province, with the application of remote sensing data and geographic information system techniques, the process of rural land use change in mountain areas of western China was monitored through extensive statistical analysis of detailed regional data. The results showed significant increases in construction land, paddy field and dry land, and a decrease in dense forest land and waste grassland between 1986 and 2002. The conversions between dense forest land and sparse forest land, grassland, waste grassland and dry land were the primary processes of rural land use change. Sparse forest land had the highest rate of land use change, with glacier or snow-capped land the lowest; while human settlement and rural economic development were found to be the main driving forces of regional difference in the integrated land use change rate among the 24 towns of Lijiang County. Quantified through landscape metrics, spatial patterns of rural land use change were represented as an increase in landscape diversity and landscape fragmentation, and the regularization of patch shapes, suggesting the intensification of human disturbances and degradation of ecological quality in the rural landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]