The Yellow Sea tidal flat: the world's largest coastal landscape in peril

초록

The Yellow Sea is a part of North Pacific Ocean. Latitudinally, it extends to around 41°N to the north and joins the East China Sea near 31°N to the south. It covers an area of about 457,000 km2. The sediments of the Yellow Sea are mostly terrigenous, carried by rivers and winds from the surrounding Chinese and Korean lands. It receives annually more than 1.6 billion tons of sediments from China’s major rivers such as the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, both of which have formed large deltas, and a considerable amount of fine and coarse-grained sediments comes from the rivers of the Korean Peninsula as well. The Yellow Sea tidal flat covers an area of about 21,000 km2, and when treated as one complex, it rates as the largest intertidal area in the world. The Yellow Sea tidal flat hosts a vast diversity of flora and fauna that are critical to biogeochemical cycles and that serve not only as an important source of food in this region but also provide with the unique coastal landscape. However, recent serious changes in the biological resources along with the wetlands losses are largely due to effects of human activities. The Yellow Sea tidal flat is faced with four main challenges; (1) sharp decrease of sediment discharge into the sea by damming and diking of major rivers, (2) rapid increase of pollution matter into the sea due to the population expansion, (3) habitat loss due to the coastal wetlands reclamation, (4) fisheries operations. Many of these environmental problems are of a transboundary nature in this region, so that multi-national action plans to control these challenges are needed as in the European Wadden Sea Trilateral Co-operation Program.