Zoning of soil and water conservation monitoring in Huaihe River Basin

Soil and water conservation monitoring is one of the main tasks and essential for improving ecological environment. It is also an important guarantee of socio-economic sustainable development. Taking the Huaihe River Basin in rocky mountain areas of northern China as the research area, we propose a two-grade zoning method of soil and water conservation monitoring, by combining the principal factor analysis and assessment of different ecological functions in soil and water conservation. The results showed that: 1) the Huaihe River Basin could be divided into seven first-grade zones (types of soil and water erosion monitoring areas) and 15 second-grade zones (functional monitoring areas of soil and water conservation), which can demonstrate the main ecological functions and spatial distribution patterns of soil and water conservation monitoring. 2 ) The principal ecological functions of soil and water conservation monitoring of the Huaihe River Basin include water conservation, soil conservation, farmland protection, wind prevention and sand fixation. The areas of different function monitoring zones follow the order of farmland protection area (61.0% of all the entire basin) > soil conservation area (26.4%) >water conservation area (7.3%) > wind prevention and sand fixation area (5.3%).