Shifan Qiu

Social vulnerability assessment of natural hazards on county-scale using high spatial resolution satellite imagery: a case study in the Luogang district of Guangzhou, South China

Social vulnerability assessment of natural hazards aims to identify vulnerable populations and provide decision makers with scientific basis for their disaster prevention and mitigation decisions. A new method based on remote sensing is presented here to establish a model of social vulnerability for county-scale regions that lack of relative data. To calculate population density, which is the most important indicator in social vulnerability assessment, first, a statistical model is established to estimate the population on village level. Then a new concept defined as “population density based on land use” is created to replace the arithmetic population density. The former has taken the dynamic human distribution related to land use into account; thus, it can map the population distribution more realistically. The other two indicators are age structure and distance to hospital. The application of this method to the Luogang District of Guangzhou, South China demonstrated its capability of providing high spatial resolution and reasonable social vulnerability for social vulnerability assessment of natural hazards.

A sedimentary paleomagnetic record of the upper Jaramillo transition from the Lantian Basin in China

The termination of the Jaramillo (normal to reverse) subchron is a key chronostratigraphic marker for dating global Pleistocene sedimentary sequences. However, the stratigraphic position of the geomagnetic polarity reversal varies greatly across the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP), from near the bottom of paleosol unit S9 to the middle-upper part of S10. Here, we present paleomagnetic and rock magnetic results from high-resolution sampling of the Yushan loess section of the Lantian Basin located within the southern CLP. Our combined analyses determine that the polarity reversal is located in the middle-lower part of the paleosol unit S10. This stratigraphic position is lower than most of other studies conducted throughout the CLP. We attribute the difference in the location of the reversal to a deeper lock-in depth of remanence acquisition, which may have occurred from postdepositional processes under favorable hydrothermal conditions along the southern margin of CLP. It is important to note that age determinations through magnetic stratigraphy on sedimentary sections, particularly in discontinuous and/or imperfect sequences, should be treated with caution; there are significant differences with respect to the location of the polarity reversal throughout the CLP.