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A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Hydrology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 June 2025 | Viewed by 7298

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Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Qiting Zuo

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School of Water Conservancy and Transportation, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China
Interests: human–water harmony; climate change adaptation; integrated water resource management; interconnected river system network; high-quality development for Yellow River; water environment protection
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Prof. Dr. Fuqiang Wang

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College of Water Resources, North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power, Zhengzhou, China
Interests: ecological hydrology; wetland protection and restoration; water resources planning and management; eco-hydrological process of wetland
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Prof. Dr. Jiaqi Zhai

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China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR), Beijing, China
Interests: water cycle model; mechanism of water resources attenuation; efficient utilization of water resources; eco-hydrological process in arid area
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Prof. Dr. Xiuyu Zhang

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Guest Editor

College of Water Resources, North China University of Water Resources and Hydropower, Zhengzhou, China
Interests: water resources dynamic carrying capacity; water security under climate change; high efficient utilization of water resources; utilization of rainwater and flood resources in river basin; construction and application of water cycle model
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Prof. Dr. Dunxian She

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School of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Interests: climate change and extreme hydrological events; urban hydrology
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Dr. Lei Zou

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Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Interests: satellite remote sensing; hydrological modeling; climate and land use change
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Dr. Rong Gan

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School of Water Conservancy Engineering, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China
Interests: distributed hydrological model; effects of climate change on hydrological processes; uncertainties of hydrological models; baseflow separation
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Prof. Dr. Zengliang Luo

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Guest Editor

School of Geography and Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China
Interests: hydrological modelling; water budget assessment; precipitation merging technologies and products based on multiple remote sensing
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Affected by global climate change and rapid socio-economic development, China suffers from severe water security pressure, especially in terms of water shortages, flood disasters and water-related ecological and environmental problems. The solution to these problems requires comprehensive research across different disciplines.

Focusing on discussing China’s water issues, we carried out a series of academic exchanges over a long period. The well-known “China Water Forum”, launched in 2003 and held annually, focuses on discussing solutions to China’s water issues. By 2023, the forum was successfully held for 20 sessions. “Water Science Development Forum”, launched in 2007 and held annually, focuses on promoting the multidisciplinary integration of other disciplines with water science research. By 2023, the forum was successfully held for 16 sessions. “Water Science Lectures”, launched in 2021, is an open, shared and non-profit public welfare lecture. A report will be arranged for each lecture, which will be lectured and presided over by invited famous researchers.

The Editorial Department of Water Journal cooperates with “China Water Forum”, “Water Science Development Forum” and “Water Science Lectures” to set up a series of columns. At least one column is planned each year currently. The column established in 2024 is “China Water Forum 2024”. We welcome scholars and graduate students participating in the above-mentioned conferences, as well as scholars who study water issues in China, to submit full texts of their unpublished manuscripts. The received papers will be professionally peer-reviewed and recommended for publication by the editorial board.

We invite submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

（1）Climate change and hydrology Director: Dunxian She, Rong Gan

（2）Water problems and human–water relationship control Director: Zengliang Luo, Qiting Zuo

（3）Water environment and ecology Director: Fuqiang Wang, Jiaqi Zhai

（4）Water information technology and modeling Director: Lei Zou, Xiuyu Zhang.

Prof. Dr. Qiting Zuo
Prof. Dr. Fuqiang Wang
Prof. Dr. Jiaqi Zhai
Prof. Dr. Xiuyu Zhang
Prof. Dr. Dunxian She
Dr. Lei Zou
Dr. Rong Gan
Prof. Dr. Zengliang Luo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

climate change and hydrological evolution
water resources evaluation, planning and management
flood, drought and water security
human–water relationship and comprehensive control
ecohydrology and water environment protection
groundwater resources and environment
water information technology and digital twin basins
national water network and major water conservancy projects
water policy and water control strategy
“carbon peak and neutrality” target and water resources

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Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

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17 pages, 5908 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Evaluating the Influence of Water Quality on Clogging Behavior in Drip Irrigation Emitters: A CT Imaging Study

by Yuqian Yao, Yang Xiao, Peng Hou and Shuqin Li

Water 2025, 17(7), 1065; https://doi.org/10.3390/w17071065 - 3 Apr 2025

Viewed by 289

Abstract

Applying poor-quality water in drip irrigation has become increasingly common to address agricultural water scarcity. However, emitter clogging remains a critical challenge that limits the widespread adoption of this technology. Currently, the mechanism of emitter clogging under poor-quality water conditions remains insufficiently explored. This study investigates the distribution and accumulation of clogging substances within drip irrigation emitters under three water conditions: saline water, Yellow River water, and a 1:1 mixture of both, at clogging degrees of 5%, 20%, and 50% (i.e., the flow rate reaches 95%, 80%, 50% of the rated flow). The results showed that when clogging reached 20%, Yellow River water led to the highest clogging volume (i.e., the total volume of clogging substance in the flow channel, 1.77 mm³), while at 50%, saline water resulted in the highest clogging volume (5.11 mm³), while the use of blended water improved the clogging situation. Under different water conditions, clogging substances mainly formed on the upstream and downstream faces of the flow channel, accounting for 23.9–31.8% and 9.3–32.4% of the total volume, respectively. With higher clogging levels, the proportion of clogging substances on the downstream face increased significantly, while other areas showed minimal change. The volume of clogging substances was more pronounced at the front of the flow channel than at the back across the entire length, except at the 20% clogging degree for Yellow River water. At 5% clogging, the largest difference in clogging volume was observed with Yellow River water, while at 50%, the largest difference occurred with blended water. This research provides critical insights into the impact of poor-quality water on emitter clogging and suggests that the use of blending water, gradually varying channel structure, and increasing the arc of clogging faces can effectively alleviate clogging and enhance drip irrigation efficiency. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue China Water Forum 2024)

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20 pages, 24166 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Deep Learning Method Coupling a Channel Attention Mechanism and Weighted Dice Loss Function for Water Extraction in the Yellow River Basin

by Jichang Yang, Yuncong Lu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jieru Wei, Jiandong Shang, Chong Wei, Wensheng Tang and Junjie Chen

Water 2025, 17(4), 478; https://doi.org/10.3390/w17040478 - 8 Feb 2025

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 568

Abstract

The extraction of small water bodies in the Yellow River Basin has always been a key issue of concern in the fields of remote sensing technology application, water resource management, environmental science, and geographic information systems. Due to factors such as water bodies, human activities, and cloud cover, water body extraction becomes difficult. In addition, convolutional neural networks are prone to losing small water body feature information during the process of extracting local features, which can cause more imbalance between positive and negative samples of water bodies and non-water bodies. In response to these issues, this study focused on a specific research area—the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. We processed and analyzed high-resolution optical satellite images collected from the Yellow River Basin and other areas, with a particular emphasis on precise identification of small water bodies, and proposed a network structure, the SE-Attention-Residual-Unet (SE-ResUnet), for water extraction tasks.The main contributions of this article are threefold: (1) Introducing a channel attention mechanism with residual structure in the down-sampling process, and learning Unet’s skipping structure for multi-scale feature extraction and compensation, thereby enhancing the feature extraction ability of small water bodies, including rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. (2) Introducing a weighted-Dice (W-Dice) loss function to balance positive and negative samples and enhance the generalization of the model. (3) In comparative experiments on improving the Unet model with semantic segmentation networks such as Unet, PSPNet, Deeplabv3+ on a self-built dataset and remote sensing interpretation public dataset, excellent performance and results were achieved on the mIoU, OA, and F1-score metrics. On the self-built dataset, compared with Unet, the mIoU, OA, and F1-score improved by 0.38%, 0.12%, and 0.08%, respectively. On the publicly available dataset, for remote sensing interpretation of water extraction, the mIoU, OA, and F1-score improved by 0.63%, 0.26%, and 0.25%, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that a strategy combining an attention mechanism and a weighted loss function has a significant effect on the effectiveness of the collaborative improvement of neural network models in water extraction tasks. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue China Water Forum 2024)

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12 pages, 4543 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Simulation of Heavy Metal Removal in Irrigation Water Using a Shell-Derived Biochar-Integrated Ecological Recycled Concrete

by Yongxiao Ren, Xiaoxiao Lai, Jiawei Wang, Ronggui Li, Shenshen Li, Xingyu Yan, Jing Liu and Shuai Song

Water 2024, 16(24), 3646; https://doi.org/10.3390/w16243646 - 18 Dec 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1024

Abstract

Water pollution intensifies water scarcity and poses a significant threat to ecosystems and human health. Construction waste generated by rapid urbanization also imposes a considerable burden on the environment. Fortunately, a large portion of this waste can be efficiently converted into recycled aggregates and reused in various fields including environmental remediation. In this study, three types of eco-recycled concretes (ERC) (Control-ERC, Biochar-ERC-1, and Biochar-ERC-2) were formulated by integrating shell-derived biochar with recycled aggregates. The porosity and water permeability of these concretes were characterized, and their efficacy evaluated in treating polluted water with six primary heavy metals (HMs), i.e., cadmium (Cd), chromium (Cr), arsenic (As), manganese (Mn), lead (Pb), and copper (Cu). Biochar addition significantly enhanced the continuous porosity and water permeability of the concrete, and substantially enhanced its adsorption capacity of HMs. Specifically, Biochar-ERCs removed over 90% of As, Cd, and Mn, and achieved a removal rate exceeding 60% for other HMs, surpassing the performance of Control-ERC. This study not only lays a solid foundation for the wide application of Biochar-ERCs in the field of environmental protection and remediation, but also provides strong technical support and practical examples for advancing the circular economy model of converting waste into resources while addressing the challenge of global water scarcity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue China Water Forum 2024)

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20 pages, 3344 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Changes in Streamflow Pattern and Complexity in the Whole Yangtze River Basin

by Pingyu Lv, Sidong Zeng, Xin Liu and Linhan Yang

Water 2024, 16(17), 2467; https://doi.org/10.3390/w16172467 - 30 Aug 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1047

Abstract

The assessment of streamflow patterns and their complexity variations across multiple timescales within river basins is a crucial aspect of water resource management and policy formulation. In this study, the Hurst coefficient, Mann–Kendall nonparametric test method, streamflow pattern indices, and sample entropy (SampEn) analyses were used to investigate the streamflow pattern in the whole Yangtze River basin at annual, monthly, and daily scales. The results show that with the increase in the time resolution, the streamflow shows more complex changing characteristics and streamflow changes more obviously on the monthly timescale than on the annual one. The annual mean streamflow decreases only in some of the tributaries, while the monthly streamflow shows significant increasing trends in the dry season and significant decreasing trends in the late wet season in almost the whole basin. Results also show that the minimum extreme streamflow indices increase in almost the whole basin. The maximum indices show decreasing trends in most of the tributaries and the Yichang gauge in the main reach. The streamflow complexity in the tributaries is higher and the complexity increases from upstream to downstream along the main reach in the basin. Along the main reach, the average SampEn increases downstream of the reach with values of 0.05, 0.07, 0.10, 0.12, 0.14, and 0.14 at Shigu, Pingshan, Cuntan, Yichang, Hankou, and Datong, respectively. These findings are helpful for understanding the hydrological characteristics and water resource management in the Yangtze River basin. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue China Water Forum 2024)

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17 pages, 4057 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Sewage Vertical Infiltration Introduced Polygenic Multipollutants into Groundwater

by Yihan Dong, Yifan Han, Xu Han, Yaoxuan Chen and Yuanzheng Zhai

Water 2024, 16(16), 2305; https://doi.org/10.3390/w16162305 - 16 Aug 2024

Viewed by 1085

Abstract

With the increasing environmental impacts of human activities, the problem of polygenic multipollutants in groundwater has attracted the attention of researchers. Identifying the hydrobiogeochemical characteristics of the surface sewage that replenishes groundwater is crucial to addressing this problem. The input of polygenic multipollutants into groundwater leads to not only the mechanical superposition of pollutants but also the formation of secondary pollutant types. The evolution of polygenic multipollutants is influenced by aquifer characteristics, carbon sources, microbial abundance, etc. Therefore, this study took a sewage leakage point in Northwest China as the research object, carried out a controlled laboratory experiment on the impact of sewage discharge on groundwater, and, combined with long-term field monitoring results, determined the main hydrobiogeochemical processes of polygenic multipollutants and their secondary pollutants. The results showed that the redox environment and the gradient change in pH were identified as the most critical controlling factors. In oxidative groundwater during the early stage of vertical infiltration, sewage carries a substantial amount of NH₄⁺, which is oxidized to form the secondary pollutant NO₃⁻. As O₂ is consumed, the reduction intensifies, and secondary pollutants NO₃⁻, Mn (IV), and Fe(III) minerals are successively reduced. Compared with the natural conditions of rainwater vertical infiltration, the reaction rates and intensities of various reactions significantly increase during sewage vertical infiltration. However, there is a notable difference in the groundwater pH between sewage and rainwater vertical infiltration. In O₂ and secondary pollutant NO₃⁻ reduction, a large amount of CO₂ is rapidly generated. Excessive CO₂ dissolves to produce a substantial amount of H⁺, promoting the acidic dissolution of Mn (II) minerals and generation of Mn²⁺. Sewage provides a higher carbon load, enhancing Mn (II) acidic dissolution and stimulating the activity of dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium, which exhibits a higher contribution to NO₃⁻ reduction. This results in a portion of NO₃⁻ converted from NH₄⁺ being reduced back to NH₄⁺ and retained in the groundwater, reducing the denitrification’s capacity to remove secondary NO₃⁻. This has important implications for pollution management and groundwater remediation, particularly monitored natural attenuation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue China Water Forum 2024)

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21 pages, 8536 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Multi-Model Comparison in the Attribution of Runoff Variation across a Humid Region of Southern China

by Qiang Wang, Fang Yang, Xiaozhang Hu, Peng Hou, Yin Zhang, Pengjun Li and Kairong Lin

Water 2024, 16(12), 1729; https://doi.org/10.3390/w16121729 - 18 Jun 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 941

Abstract

The natural hydrological cycle of basins has been significantly altered by climate change and human activities, leading to considerable uncertainties in attributing runoff. In this study, the impact of climate change and human activities on runoff of the Ganjiang River Basin was analyzed, and a variety of models with different spatio-temporal scales and complexities were used to evaluate the influence of model choice on runoff attribution and to reduce the uncertainties. The results show the following: (1) The potential evapotranspiration in the Ganjiang River Basin showed a significant downward trend, precipitation showed a significant upward trend, runoff showed a nonsignificant upward trend, and an abrupt change was detected in 1968; (2) The three hydrological models used with different temporal scales and complexity, GR1A, ABCD, DTVGM, can simulate the natural distribution of water resources in the Ganjiang River Basin; and (3) The impact of climate change on runoff change ranges from 60.07% to 82.88%, while human activities account for approximately 17.12% to 39.93%. The results show that climate change is the main driving factor leading to runoff variation in the Ganjiang River Basin. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue China Water Forum 2024)

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Review

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18 pages, 4533 KiB

Open AccessReview

Seasonal Variations of Ice-Covered Lake Ecosystems in the Context of Climate Warming: A Review

by Qianqian Wang, Fang Yang, Haiqing Liao, Weiying Feng, Meichen Ji, Zhiming Han, Ting Pan and Dongxia Feng

Water 2024, 16(19), 2727; https://doi.org/10.3390/w16192727 - 25 Sep 2024

Viewed by 1296

Abstract

The period of freezing is an important phenological characteristic of lakes in the Northern Hemisphere, exhibiting higher sensitivity to regional climate changes and aiding in the detection of Earth’s response to climate change. This review systematically examines 1141 articles on seasonal frozen lakes from 1991 to 2021, aiming to understand the seasonal variations and control conditions of ice-covered lakes. For the former, we discussed the physical structure and growth characteristics of seasonal ice cover, changes in water environmental conditions and primary production, accumulation and transformation of CO₂ beneath the ice, and the role of winter lakes as carbon sources or sinks. We also proposed a concept of structural stratification based on the differences in physical properties of ice and solute content. The latter provided an overview of the ice-covered period (−1.2 d decade⁻¹), lake evaporation (+16% by the end of the 21st century), the response of planktonic organisms (earlier spring blooming: 2.17 d year⁻¹) to global climate change, the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on ice-free events, and the influence of individual characteristics such as depth, latitude, and elevation on the seasonal frozen lakes. Finally, future research directions for seasonally ice-covered lakes are discussed. Considering the limited and less systematic research conducted so far, this study aims to use bibliometric methods to synthesize and describe the trends and main research points of seasonal ice-covered lakes so as to lay an important foundation for scholars in this field to better understand the existing research progress and explore future research directions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue China Water Forum 2024)

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