Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Meteorology Volume 2013, Article ID 972430, 7 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/972430 Research Article Effects of Alpine Wetland Landscapes on Regional Climate on the Zoige Plateau of China Junhong Bai, 1 Qiongqiong Lu, 1 Qingqing Zhao, 1 Junjing Wang, 1 and Hua Ouyang 2 1 State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China 2 Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China Correspondence should be addressed to Junhong Bai; junhongbai@163.com Received 24 July 2013; Revised 2 September 2013; Accepted 1 October 2013 Academic Editor: Xiangzheng Deng Copyright © 2013 Junhong Bai et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. he diferences in the air temperature, precipitation, evaporation, and relative humidity between wetlands and nonwetlands were analyzed to investigate the efects of alpine wetlands on regional climate. Meanwhile, the changes in precipitation and surface runof luxes before and ater the typical wetland degradation were discussed, and the efects of wetland degradation on soil organic carbon were assessed. Correlation and regression analyses were applied to exhibit the relationships between wetland landscape areas and meteorological factors. Our results showed that the cooling efects of wetlands on ambient environment were very obvious, and soil temperature could be higher in the area with less surrounding wetland area. he evaporation capacity and relative humidity in wetlands were higher compared to the surrounding non-wetlands. Precipitation and surface runof lux decreased due to serious wetland degradation, indicating that wetland degradation or expansion had close relation with regional precipitation. Once peat soils were converted to meadow soils or Aeolian sandy soils, soil organic carbon (SOC) would decline linearly. Correlation and regression analyses showed that there were signiicant correlations between wetland landscape areas and the annual average air temperature, the average air temperature in growing seasons, and the evaporation in growing seasons ( < 0.05). 1. Introduction Wetlands are the important underlying surface types on the earth and have their own radiation, thermal and hydrous properties, which can form unique microclimate with sig- niicant cooling and humidifying efects [1, 2]. Changes in wetland landscape patterns due to varying hydrological processes have profound impacts on wetland biodiversity, ecological processes, and the emission of greenhouse gases as well as regional and even global climate [3], which is closely related to wetland function changes such as carbon accumulation and emission (i.e., CO 2 and CH 4 )[4]. Some researchers have presented that wetland drainage (including peatlands) can increase soil respiration [5, 6] and have a signiicant contribution to the feedback processes of carbon cycle and climate change [7]. herefore, wetlands play an important role in global warming as a result of the great potential of carbon emission [8]. Zoige Plateau is a hummocky plateau with the highest and largest area of alpine peatland wetlands worldwide. he alpine wetlands on the Zoige Plateau cover approximately 470,000 hm 2 , where the amount of reserved peats can reach up to 7.6 billion m 3 and become the biggest peat mining area in China. However, these alpine peatlands are sufering from serious degradation or alternation due to global climate change and anthropogenic activities, which have caused a large amount of carbon release [9]. Moreover, the wetland degradation and peat decomposition, in turn, will afect the regional climate change, and thus promoting global warming. herefore, it is an ideal site for scientists to investigate the rela- tionship between alpine wetlands and global climate change on the Zoige Plateau. Previous researches have focused on the changes in wetland landscape patterns as well as carbon storage and emission [10–12], however, little information is available on the efects of alpine wetland changes on regional climate. he primary objectives of this study are (1) to investigate the cooling efects of wetlands based on meteorological factors of wetlands and nonwetlands; (2) to analyze the changes in the precipitation and surface runof lux before