Humans can rebuild severely eroded resilience: Demo with millennia-long records in China's Loess Plateau

Authors: Zhang, Xunchang; CHEN, JIE - Wuhan University; LIU, GUOBIN - Northwest Agricultural & Forestry University

Submitted to: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences-Nexus
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/18/2026
Publication Date: 4/16/2026
Citation: Zhang, X.J., Chen, J., Liu, G. 2026. Humans can rebuild severely eroded resilience: Demo with millennia-long records in China's Loess Plateau. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences-Nexus. 5(5):127. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag127.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag127

Interpretive Summary: There exist growing interests in integrating social and ecological sciences to elucidate human-nature interactions from the perspective of social-ecological systems (SES). The compelling logic in the past is that people inevitably harm nature as they use it; however, people have learned to use it while protecting or even improving it. Nowadays though there is a growing emphasis on the potential to transform into a more desirable SES with deliberate human actions rather than adaptation to the existing conditions, this theory has not been tested, due to the lack of large-scale and long-term records. We used the millennia-long records of humans' alteration to SES in China’s Loess Plateau (LP) test this ecological theory. Here, we demonstrated human activities can erode ecological resilience (defined as the ecological ability to recover from external disturbance) or improve it to provide better ecosystem provisioning services than the pristine. Compared with the pristine state, average soil erosion in LP in the Middle Yellow River was doubled in the 1950s due to deforestation, while it decreased substantially at the present by human intervention of environmental factors such as land use changes and terrain modifications by building bench terraces and sediment-trapping dams. Building resilience by attending those environmental factors rather than controlling external disturbance should be the goal of adaptive ecosystem management in a SES and the way to build win-win solution that benefits both human and nature. This work would be useful to ecologists for building ecological resilience by properly managing key relevant environmental factors. "USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer."

Technical Abstract: There exist growing interests in integrating social and ecological sciences to elucidate human-nature interactions from the perspective of social-ecological systems (SES). The compelling logic in the past is that people inevitably harm nature as they use it; however, people have learned to use it while protecting or even improving it. Nowadays though there is a growing emphasis on transformability into a more desirable SES with deliberate human actions rather than adaptation to the existing conditions, this theory has not been tested, due to the lack of large-scale and long-term records. The millennia-long records of humans to alter SES in China’s Loess Plateau (LP) provides a unique means to test ecological theories and heuristic models. Here, we demonstrated human activities can erode ecological resilience or improve it to provide better eco-services than the pristine. Average soil erosion in LP increased from 0.8 Gt/a under the pristine state to the highest rate of 1.6 Gt/a in the 1950s due to deforestation, whereas decreased to 16% of the pristine rate at the present by human intervention of environmental slow variables. Building resilience by attending to slow variables rather than controlling disturbance should be the goal of adaptive ecosystem management in a SES. "USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer."