Desertification sensitivity and its impacts on land use change in the Tarim Basin, Northwest China.

Desertification poses a major challenge in the northwestern arid areas of China. Land use activities are increasingly endangered by desertification, including direct impact (e.g.

Effects of agricultural land use on soil nutrients and its variation along altitude gradients in the downstream of the Yarlung Zangbo River Basin, Tibetan Plateau.

Agricultural development in alpine ecosystems can cause significant changes in soil nutrients. With large altitude spans, the combined effect of the two is still unclear in existing research. To answer this problem, this study took the downstream of the Yarlung Zangbo River Basin (YZRB) as the study area, and designed a comparative soil sampling scheme along the altitude gradient.

Improving the ecological network optimization with landscape connectivity: a case study of Neijiang City, Sichuan Province.

Rapid urbanization intensifies the fragmentation of landscape patches and affects the stability of ecosystems. The construction of an ecological network can effectively promote the connection of important ecological spaces and improve the landscape integrity. However, the landscape connectivity, directly affecting the stability of ecological network, was less considered in the ecological network construction of recent researches, which easily caused the instability of constructed ecological network.

A spatial directivity-based sensitivity analysis to farmland quality evaluation in arid areas.

Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is an important means for evaluating resources and environment, and sensitivity analysis can enhance understand the robustness of evaluation results. Spatial visualization has been used in sensitivity analysis of MCDM, but the sensitivity results are still generally summarized by presenting traditional statistical measurements that omit the spatial information. To address this issue, this paper proposed a novel spatially measurement approach of sensitivity analysis by introducing the spatial barycenter model (SBM), which overcame the limitations of existing statistical methods and provided the spatial directivity of uncertainty for the MCDM results.

Information entropy and elasticity analysis of the land use structure change influencing eco-environmental quality in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau from 1990 to 2015.

Regional land use change affects eco-environmental quality by altering ecosystem structure and function. The primitive ecosystem and environment of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) occupies a special position in the world, but it is very fragile. Although land use activities on the plateau have increased gradually in past decades, its effects on eco-environmental quality and the underlying mechanisms of regional heterogeneity remain unclear.

[Comparison of spatial-temporal evolution of habitat quality between Xinjiang Corps and Non-corps Region based on land use].

Regional habitat quality is an important indicator of ecosystem health. Understanding land use change and habitat quality will help protect biodiversity and build an ecological security pattern. We used the InVEST model to quantitatively evaluate the habitat quality of the Xinjiang Corps and Non-corps Region based on land use data of 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2018, and further analyzed the similarities and differences of the spatiotemporal distribution.

Temporal-spatial trends in potentially toxic trace element pollution in farmland soil in the major grain-producing regions of China.

Pollution from potentially toxic trace elements (PTEs) is becoming serious and widespread in farmland soils in China, threatening food security and human health. Few large-scale studies systematically analyzed their temporal-spatial trends over vast spatially elaborate sites. The soil health status of the main grain producing areas was first announced based on a total of 3662 spatially elaborate farmland topsoil sites from the 1980s to the 2000s.

[Spatial-Temporal Trends and Pollution Source Analysis for Heavy Metal Contamination of Cultivated Soils in Five Major Grain Producing Regions of China].

Heavy metal pollution of farmland soils in China has been identified as a threat to ecosystem safety and human health. A total of 3006 soil samples were analyzed from arable lands in five grain producing regions of China, which included data from published studies from 2000 up to now. An additional 656 historical samples were derived from the 1980s by a digitizing grained point sites map (Cd, Pb, As, Ni, Cu, Zn, Cr, and Hg) from the PRC Atlas of Soil Environmental Background Values.

An evaluation of the ecological and environmental security on China's terrestrial ecosystems.

With rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization, various ecological and environmental problems occur, which threaten and undermine the sustainable development and domestic survival of China. On the national scale, our progress remains in a state of qualitative or semi-quantitative evaluation, lacking a quantitative evaluation and a spatial visualization of ecological and environmental security. This study collected 14 indictors of water, land, air, and biodiversity securities to compile a spatial evaluation of ecological and environmental security in terrestrial ecosystems of China.

Semi-natural areas of Tarim Basin in northwest China: Linkage to desertification.

Semi-natural lands are not intensively managed lands, which have ecological significance in protecting artificial oasis and preventing desertification in arid regions. The significant shrinkage and degradation of semi-natural lands in the land-use intensification process have caused severe desertification. However, there is a knowledge gap regarding the spatio-temporal pattern and detailed classification of semi-natural lands and its quantitative relationship with desertification.

Mining spatial information to investigate the evolution of karst rocky desertification and its human driving forces in Changshun, China.

The processes of karst rocky desertification (KRD) have been found to cause the most severe environmental degradation in southwestern China. Understanding the driving forces that cause KRD is essential for managing and restoring the areas that it impacts. Studies of the human driving forces of KRD are limited to the county level, a specific administrative unit in China; census data are acquired at this scale, which can lead to scale biases.