Human affinity for rivers

Yichu Wang, Alistair Borthwick, Jinren Ni

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Human civilization prospers along rivers worldwide. Here we investigated human-river relations by revealing the linkage between water and habitability for human settlements, socioeconomic and cultural development across China. We found that human-water co-occurrence relationships are self-similar over sub-basins for different scales of stream-order in the river networks. According to the earliest complete demographic census in the Qing Dynasty (1776), there has been a general tendency for inhabitants to live close to rivers, characterized by population density associated with habitability in proximity to water under near natural state, and confirmed to remain effective to date (2019) even after long-term population growth and human interventions. We examined the historical linkage of human settlements to human attributes with river networks, derived four different modes of human aggregation towards rivers, and elucidated the geographical diversity of river density, population density, cultural prosperity, and clusters of ethnicity, particularly the Western and the Northeast culture established in arid (desert) areas, the Huaxia culture in alluvial plains, the
Loess/Nomadic/Southwestern Ethnic culture in plateaus, and the Qi-Lu/Wu-Yue/Linnan culture in coastal areas of China. This work is also of significance to understanding long-term human-water relationships at global scale.
Original languageEnglish
JournalRiver
Early online date16 Aug 2022
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 16 Aug 2022

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • river network
  • human settlement
  • river density
  • habitability
  • population density
  • cultural prosperity
  • geographical diversity

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