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Henan Province is the birthplace of Chinese civilization and one of the earliest human settlements, which means that the area has an important national cultural heritage. Traditional villages are an important facet of this cultural heritage, and studying their spatiotemporal characteristics in different periods has important theoretical and practical significance for the sustainable development and protection of cultural heritage in the region. This paper takes the traditional villages of the Yellow River basin in Henan Province that were formed before 1919 as the research object. Information on the ancient river was obtained through a literature search as well as via field research, and the important tributaries of the Yellow River in different periods were mapped using ArcGIS 10.0 software. The nearest neighbor index, kernel density estimation, standard deviation ellipse and other methods were adopted to analyze the spatiotemporal characteristics of the traditional villages. The factors that influenced the evolution of traditional villages were explored in depth by combining changes in the course of the river and water conservancy projects. The results show that the formation of traditional villages along the Yellow River in Henan Province has experienced a historical track of growth, contraction, growth and prosperity and stability. The traditional villages along the Yellow River in Henan Province generally show a clustered pattern, forming a dense concentration of traditional villages in the middle reaches of the Yellow River. The center of gravity shows a migration trend from southeast to northwest. In terms of influencing factors, the spatiotemporal evolution of the relationship between villages and their distance to water is closely related to climatic fluctuations, changes in channel, water conservancy projects and social and cultural factors. This paper deepens our understanding of the relationship between traditional village evolution and watersheds by improving the consistency between village spatial distribution and historical geography and provides a useful theoretical reference for the sustainable development of China's traditional villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The extent of flooding in China is greater than in any other country. • Nearly 66% of China's landmass is submerged by flooding. • Financial toll of flooding accounts for approximately 1.42% of the annual GDP. • Various forms of climatic change contribute to flooding. The extent of flooding in China is more significant than in any other country. Our research reveals that approximately 66 % of China's landmass is submerged by flooding, affecting about 50 % of the population. Furthermore, the financial toll of flooding now accounts for approximately 1.42 % of the annual gross domestic product (GDP), which is almost 40 times higher than the corresponding figure for the United States. We have observed that Zhengzhou city in Henan province, which faced a devastating flood in 2021, received a significant amount of rainfall, specifically a total of 552.5 mm within a 24-hour period. The floods in Henan province in 2021 caused considerable damage, including impacting nearly 15 million people, resulting in almost 400 deaths, damaging over 10,000 square kilometers of agricultural land, causing almost $19 billion in economic losses, and leading to the collapse of over 35,000 households and damage to various properties. In a similar manner, the significant flooding that occurred in southern China in 2020 impacted approximately 7.1 million individuals across eight provinces and resulted in 54 fatalities, the collapse of 6,700 houses, and incurred a direct economic loss of US$3.33 billion. We found that rainstorms have significantly increased to 10 % in the last 60 years in China. In this paper, we delved into exploring the existing published articles, reports, and government and authoritative legal texts to analyze the causes and impacts of flooding in China's flood-prone regions and potential mitigation strategies to reduce the repercussions of distressing flood events. We believe this study will help policymakers by providing new insights while formulating policy to reduce the loss caused by high-level flooding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Tree ring is an ideal indicator of annual total grain production parameters. • Tree growth synchronized with grain production, and concurrent response to climate. • Reconstruction of total grain productivity based on dendrochronology. • To explore the relationship between total grain sown area and climate change. Climate change affects the growth of regional vegetation; both trees and grain crops often change concurrently, such that the annual radial growth of trees shows consistent inter-annual variations with the total grain crop productivity. However, it remains unclear whether they exhibit concurrent responses to climate factors, and that there lacks of the study on long-term high-resolution variations of grain crops productivity. This paper employs a Pinus massoniana tree-ring series from the Tongbai Mountains to analyze the correlations between tree-ring chronology, local climate data and grain productivity indicators (i.e., total sown grain areas (TSA), total grain outputs (TGO), and average grain yield per hectare (YPH)) of Henan Province in central China. The results indicate that temperature in March and August was the main limiting factor on tree growth, and the best concurrent relationship with tree growth was TSA, which has a correlation of 0.747 (p < 0.001) during 1959–2020. Therefore, a 124-year TSA series in Henan Province was reconstructed using tree-ring data from the Tongbai Mountains, which reveals there were two distinct low periods of total grain sown area in the 1920 s-1930 s and 1980 s-2000 s. There are significant cycles of about 2.57a (p < 0.01), 2.89a (p < 0.05), and 10.95a (p < 0.1), indicating that vegetation growth might be affected by large-scale climate forcing, such as ENSO (2-7a cycle) and sunspot activity (11a cycle). Overall, this study outlines a new approach to understand long-term changes in grain production, which is conducive to grain management and socioeconomic sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A deep learning algorithm is used to build a comprehensive drought monitoring model. • Multi-source remote sensing data is processed as input data. • The comprehensive drought model has good applicability in the monitoring of meteorological drought and agricultural drought. • The model successfully monitored a drought process in Henan Province, China. • This study provides a new method for the comprehensive assessment of regional drought. Drought is a popular scientific issue in global climate change research. Accurate monitoring of drought has important implications for the sustainable development of regional agriculture in the context of increasingly complex global climate change. Deep learning is a widely used technique in the field of artificial intelligence. However, ongoing on drought monitoring using deep learning is relatively scarce. In this paper, the various hazard factors in drought development were comprehensively considered based on satellite data including Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and tropical rainfall measuring mission (TRMM) as multi-source remote sensing data. By using the deep learning technique, a comprehensive drought monitoring model was constructed and tested in Henan Province of China as an example. The results showed that the comprehensive drought model has good applicability in the monitoring of meteorological drought and agricultural drought. There was a significant positive correlation between the drought indicators of the model output and the comprehensive meteorological drought index (CI) measured at the site scale. The consistency rate of the drought grade of the two models was 85.6% and 79.8% for the training set and the test set, respectively. The correlation coefficient between the drought index of the model and the standard precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) was between 0.772 and 0.910 (P < 0.01), which indicated a strong level of significance. The correlation coefficient between the drought index of the model and the soil relative moisture at a 10 cm depth was greater than 0.550 (P < 0.01), and there was a good correlation between them. This study provides a new method for the comprehensive assessment of regional drought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henan area is climatologically situated in the transition between northern and southern China and the transition is reported to be highly sensitive to climate changes during the Holocene. To better understand the Holocene climatic and environmental changes in Henan area where high-quality data are lacking, this paper first reviewed those published palaeoenvironmental records in attempt to provide a low-resolution framework of the Holocene environmental changes in Henan area, and then synthesized the moisture proxy records from the surrounding areas in attempt to define a high-resolution trend of the Holocene moisture variation for our target site (i.e., Zhengzhou within Henan area). Two major conclusions can be drawn. First, the high-resolution Holocene moisture curve for our target site well follows the general moisture trend of China and the curve is well corroborated by two recently-reported data sets: one from Mangshan loess-palaeosol sequence and another from Laomu-Dongshiya Cave. Second, our synthesis supports an earlier notion stating that the "Holocene Moisture Optimum" in China was a delayed response to the oceanic "Holocene Thermal Optimum". The latter might in turn be a delayed response to the summer insolation peak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rainfall is a complexity dynamics process. In this paper, our objective is to find the evidence of self-organized criticality (SOC) for rain datasets in China by employing the theory and method of SOC. For this reason, we analyzed the long-term rain records of five meteorological stations in Henan, a central province of China. Three concepts, that is, rain duration, drought duration, accumulated rain amount, are proposed to characterize these rain events processes. We investigate their dynamics property by using scale invariant and found that the long-term rain processes in central China indeed exhibit the feature of self-organized criticality. The proposed theory and method may be suitable to analyze other datasets from different climate zones in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]