Soil erosion in the Yellow River basin and its impacts on reservoir sedimentation and the lower Yellow River

4 ABSTRACT The Yellow River has a drainage area of 75 x 10 sq.km with a total length of 5464 km. The river is famous for its enormous amount of sediment load in the world. Although great progresses of harnessing and exploiting of the river have been made during recent tens years, serious soil erosion in the watershed still has not been well controlled. In this paper, the features of soil erosion and its impacts, reservoir sedimentation and channel deposition of the Lower Yellow River are introduced.