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Balancing green and grain trade

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Since 1999, China's Grain for Green project has greatly increased the vegetation cover on the Loess Plateau. Now that erosion levels have returned to historic values, vegetation should be maintained but not expanded further as planned.

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Figure 1: Annual sediment discharge of the Yellow River over the past 4,000 years.
Figure 2: Vegetation coverage on the Loess Plateau from remote sensing data.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology fund.

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Author notes

  1. Y.C. is also at the State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processing and Resource Ecology, Beijing 100875, China

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yiping Chen, Kaibo Wang, Yishan Lin, Weiyu Shi and Yi Song are at the State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology and the Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Science, Xi'an 710075, China,

    Yiping Chen, Kaibo Wang, Yishan Lin, Weiyu Shi & Yi Song

  2. Xinhua He is in the School of Plant Biology, University of Western Australia, Perth 6009, Australia,

    Xinhua He

Authors
  1. Yiping Chen
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  2. Kaibo Wang
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  3. Yishan Lin
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  4. Weiyu Shi
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  5. Yi Song
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  6. Xinhua He
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yiping Chen or Xinhua He.

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Chen, Y., Wang, K., Lin, Y. et al. Balancing green and grain trade. Nature Geosci 8, 739–741 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2544

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