Isotope-based water-use efficiency of major greening plants in a sponge city in northern China

Abstract

To tackle urban water issues, the Chinese government has promoted the construction of sponge cities in recent years. Thirty cities have been designated as experimental sites to serve as models for future sponge city construction, as more than 80% of the built-up urban areas in China must reach the standards of sponge cities by 2030. Greening plants play an important role in sponge cities, and water-use efficiency (WUE) is a vital index to determine whether plants could adapt to and grow healthily in environments with water deficits. In this study, WUE of greening plants was quantified by measuring the stable carbon isotope fractionation. Suitable plants for the green spaces in Guyuan sponge city, in northern China, were selected based on their WUE, and the main factors affecting WUE were studied in four habitats within the city. Plant species identity had the greatest effect on WUE, while habitat and plant life form had lower effect, illustrating that WUE is a relatively stable and reliable index for the classification of plant species. We can improve the WUE and ecological function of green spaces in sponge cities by using isotope technology to select suitable plant species with high WUE. To our knowledge, this study is the first to select plant species for sponge city by using this method, providing a quick and scientific method for the selection of greening plants for future sponge cities.

A New Multicriteria Decision-Making Method for the Selection of Sponge City Schemes with Shapley–Choquet Aggregation Operators

“…In November 2018, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued the technical guide for sponge city construction-"construction of a rainwater system for low-impact development." e guidelines specified the content, requirements, and methods of constructing a rainwater system for low-impact development in sponge city planning, engineering design, construction, maintenance, and management [6,9,59]. During the construction of a sponge city, the system of natural precipitation, surface water, and ground water should be coordinated; the water supply, drainage, and other water recycling links should be coordinated, and its complexity and long-term impacts should be considered [9,60,61].…”

Water-Wise Cities and Sustainable Water Systems: Concepts, Technologies, and Applications

“…As SCC aims at developing a systematic strategy to deal with complicated urban water problems, the first effort was to interpret and advance technological guidelines at the national level, associated with the identification of opportunities and challenges to promoting an overall SCC progress (Chan et al, 2018;Griffiths et al, 2020;Ren et al, 2017;Thu et al, 2020;Xia et al, 2017). Another effort was to solve urban water problems through the development of sponge-based technologies such as permeable materials (Shen et al, 2020) or greening plants (Li et al, 2019). In addition, as SCC often involves large-scale public projects that are subject to public financial support, efforts were also made to improve the financial sufficiency, including investigations on public willingness to pay for SCC projects (Wang et al, 2020), and identifications of risks in cooperative arrangements such as public-private partnerships .…”

Adaptive Variations of Sediment Microbial Communities and Indication of Fecal-Associated Bacteria to Nutrients in a Regulated Urban River

“…The annual evaporation ranges from 1250 to 2000 mm. Due to extreme shortage of water resources, Guyuan City was selected to be one of the second batch of pilot cities for Sponge City construction, which was designed by the Chinese government in 2016 [31]. The Sponge City concept is similar to low impact developments (LID) in United States, sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDs) in United Kingdom and low impact developments urban design (LIDUD) in New Zealand [32].…”