Analysis of the spatial and temporal evolution of water and soil resource carrying capacity in arid region of northwest China

The spatial and temporal evolution process of the water and soil resource carrying capacity in artificial oases in the arid zone of China was accurately revealed. This study constructs a water and soil resource analysis system based on system dynamics. It integrates cloud theory and hierarchical analysis to analyze the evolutional trend of the water and soil resource carrying capacity in irrigation areas. The spatial analysis technique was used to obtain a raster map of the spatial and temporal characteristics of the influencing factors, and analyze the evolutionary characteristics of the water and soil resources carrying capacity by integrating multi-source data. The results showed that: (1) the evaluation clouds of water and soil resources carrying capacity in 2002, 2010, and 2018 were (0.5034, 0.0236, 0.0071), (0.5586, 00218, 0.0062), and (0.5989, 0.0249, 0.0061), respectively. This showed that the carrying capacity of water and soil resources was transitioning from ‘critical bearing’ to ‘good bearing’, but the evolution rate was gradually decreasing; (2) from 2002 to 2018, the size of the ‘good bearing’ area increased by 8.38%, while the size of the ‘severe bearing’ area decreased by 6.4%; (3) the degree of dramatic evolution of the carrying capacity of water and soil resources is: continuous change > pre-change > post-change > continuous stable > repeated change; (4) the serious carrying capacity area shows a spatial pattern of decreasing in an arc from the town to the surrounding areas. The results showed that water and soil resource-carrying capacity of the irrigation area shows a healthy and continuous spatial and temporal evolution trend.