Title : Suitaiology Practices(II) — Water resource creation, de-flooding, anti-erosion and agroforestry enhancement in mountain areas

Abstract:

For a long time, human have been plagued by droughts and floods. Facing disasters, traditional measures for flood control and drought prevention often fail, which highlights the major shortcomings of traditional understanding of water resources and the deficiency of the existing water science to adapt climate changes. Suitaiology is a new
branch of water science for creation of water resources and optimization of water management to meet the challenges of climate change. Applied in the field of agriculture, it will help to fundamentally achieve sustainable agricultural development and food security. While the mainstream traditionally deals with flooding, drought, erosion, water resources, eco-systems and agriculture separately, Suitaiology treats them all together in a comprehensive system of water, human and natural environmental (WHNE) and studies the interrelationship and interaction among these internal subsystems. Mountain area is a key portion within a water basin, and has the WHNE system much more complicated than in other portions of the basin. Water always plays an active and dynamic important role in the system. It can be angel-like, nurturing life and bringing vitality to the earth, provides protection for the survival and development of humanity. However, it can also be devil-like, eroding the soil, destroying the existing landscapes, resulting in mudflow, inducing landslides, and producing flood downstream. Since mountain area is usually the recharge area of water resources in the basin, if the mountain traps water insufficient, it is easy to suffer serious drought in the whole basin. Suitaiology abandons the traditional case-by-case treatment method, grasps the situation of water in various forms (such as water mist, snow/ice cover, raindrops and runoff), which is the tendency of water action towards a specific feature or behavior type in a given space, moment, action goal and the characteristics of water itself, and from the perspective of the overall system, finds, identifies, understands, analyzes, responds and disposes the possible safety hazards of a healthy WHNE system. It aims to completely eliminate the potential disasters of debris flow, landslide and waterlogging as far as possible, create water resources fully, ensure a good ecoenvironment and the sustainable development of forestry, agriculture and livestock farming in mountainous areas, and alleviate or even avoid floods and droughts in the whole basin. 

Biography:

Dr. Dachang Zhang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in hydrogeology & Engineering Geology from the Changchun Institute of Geology and Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1982 and 1985 respectively, then became a researcher at Chinese Academy of Sciences. After his PhD degree in geography from the University of Vienna in 1996 with significant contributions to a national water project of Austria, he was a postdoctoral fellowship and researcher at the University of Waterloo, Canada from 1997-2000. And then, he worked as a consultant in Canada and U.S.A. and become a License Professional Geologist of the State of California in 2007. He also worked for the University of Bijie, China, as a Professor and the Deputy Dean of the Academy for Bijie Experimental Region for water management and rural development in impoverished mountainous areas from 2008 to 2014. He is the Founder and President of the Water &Eco Crisis Foundation, USA, since 2010. In 2012, Dr. Dachang Zhang and his team set out to create a new water science—Suitaiology, which was first released at the 1st Edition of Global Conference on Agriculture and Horticulture (AGRI 2021) in 2021.