Exploring the Variations of Redbed Badlands and Their Driving Forces in the Nanxiong Basin, Southern China: A Geographically Weighted Regression with Gridded Data

Abstract

At present, most of the international research cases on badlands are based on semiarid regions, while there are few studies on badlands in humid regions. Therefore, the research on badlands in humid regions has strong theoretical and practical significance. By taking the Nanxiong Basin, which is located in the humid regions of southern China as the research object, this paper analyzes the scale and spatial distribution variation characteristics of redbed badlands and builds a set of factors that influence redbed badlands to explore the driving forces influencing the variation of redbed badlands based on remote sensing images of the American KH-4A satellite from 1969 and a Landsat 8 image from 2017. The result shows that the scale of redbed badlands in the Nanxiong Basin had generally decreased from 1969 to 2017. The area of redbed badlands decreased from 1693.97 hm2 in 1969 to 127.4 hm2 in 2017, with a decrease of 92.48%. The spatial distribution of redbed badlands had gradually changed from the contiguous planar distribution form in 1969 to the dispersed island distribution form in 2017, forming four agglomerations. The influence degree of the driving forces for the scale variation of redbed badlands is in the order of lithology > road > aspect > residential locations > slope > water system > vegetation > garden plots. Among these driving forces, except vegetation and garden plots, which have a negative correlation with the variation of redbed badlands, other factors have a positive correlation. Lithology is positively correlated with the variation of redbed badlands and has the strongest influence on the redbed badlands of all the influencing factors. The road factor is second to the lithological factor; the more accessible an area is, the stronger the human influence will be and the more serious the damage to vegetation will be, which easily cause surface vegetation damage, induce land degradation, and form redbed badlands.