Study On The Evolution Of River Networks And Related Water Environment During The Urbanization Of Pudong New Area

As a cradle of mankind culture origin, rivers are the important linker which ties among lithosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere. The river system in the urban region is closely associated with the appearance and development of the city. The river in a city is a compound system composed of the natural earth surface evolution and manual intervenes, which functions depending on how integrated the system structure is. Decrease in quantity and water pollution of a city river will threaten directly the safety of domestic drinking water, which is to harm the biological diversity of urban ecosystem. This will also influence all aspects of manufacture and life condition. Therefore, a sound relationship between a city and its river network must be maintained. An essential challenge for the sustainable development of the city is how to protect and reasonably use the city water system, which plays the key role in promoting the life quality in the modem society.Pudong New Area, as the reform and opening front of China, hold the balance in economic development of Yangtze Delta and even of China. After a large-scale infrastructure and function development in the past decade years, it has become "the miniature of modernization construction in Shanghai" and "the symbol of reform and opening in China". But, due to rapid urbanization and associated environmental issues, including the discharge of untreated waste water directly into the river network, rivers in the study area are remaining seriously polluted and are also diminishing since people are trying to fill them out for construction. This consequently damages the feature of water village and investment setting in the Pudong New Area. To ensure the sustainable development of the society, it is an important subject for the present study of how to protect city water system and water environment management as well.This paper evaluates the dynamic change of water environment from the opening period of the Pudong New Area and reveals the potential risks hidden behind the highspeed economic development, by means of Remote Sensing (RS), Geographical Information System (GIS), Grey Relation and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Database used for the present study is derived from: 1) a set of aerial photographs in 1989, 1994 and 1999; 2) the observation data of water quality in the time period from 1990 to 2002; and 3) social and economic data, including population, GDP, quantity of domestic water usage, landuse and pollution sources.The paper starts with the changes of river networks, the evolvement of water quality and the analysis of pollution sources. It is to discuss the carrying capacity of water environment, during the urbanization in the Pudong New Area, according to the updated plan of water environment of the region. Using mathematics model and GIS, the paper deals with the coupling relationship between the change of river system andwater environment. This method could be applicable to the regional environment evaluation, aiming at building a model city district to approach the sound sustainable development.River is one of the most basic elements of physical setting in urban. Its quality and quantity are the results of long-term interaction between physical environment and mankind activities. This paper is to explore a new way to study urban geomorphology in coastal area, in light of the research in Pudong New Area. The focus of the research is to seek the determinant factors in affecting river morphology and water quality. It is a new attempt to study the coupling relationship between them during the urbanization, in views of river geomorphology and water environment theory at home and abroad. To reach this academic goal, methodological procedure of the present paper includes: 1) Remote Sensing image interpretation used to obtain the river change information; 2) overlaying landuse to analyze river network evolution trend; 3) Grey relation analysis and GIS evaluation to get the rule of water quality. By the GIS spatial analysis and the theory of water environment ca...