Climate warming disproportionately impacts countries in the Global South by increasing extreme heat exposure. However, geographic disparities in adaptation capacity are unclear. Here, we assess global inequality in green spaces, which urban residents critically rely on to mitigate outdoor heat stress.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMassive human-induced declines of large-sized animals and trees (megabiota) from the Late Pleistocene to the Anthropocene have resulted in downsized ecosystems across the globe, in which components and functions have been greatly simplified. In response, active restoration projects of extant large-sized species or functional substitutes are needed at large scales to promote ecological processes that are important for ecosystem self-regulation and biodiversity maintenance. Despite the desired global scope of such projects, they have received little attention in East Asia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
July 2022
Biotic interactions that hierarchically organize ecosystems by driving ecological and evolutionary processes across spatial scales are ubiquitous in our biosphere. Biotic interactions have been extensively studied at local and global scales, but how long-distance, cross-ecosystem interactions at intermediate landscape scales influence the structure, function, and resilience of ecological systems remains poorly understood. We used remote sensing, modeling, and field data to test the hypothesis that the long-distance impact of an invasive species dramatically affects one of the largest tidal flat ecosystems in East Asia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite releases of governmental guidelines for promoting physical fitness among the youth in China, the performance of college students in fitness tests has been declining over the past three decades. Obesity and physical inactivity have been proposed as two main causes. However, their relative importance for improving physical fitness remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2020
Human activities currently play a dominant role in shaping and eroding Earth's biodiversity, but the historical dynamics leading to this situation are poorly understood and contentious. Importantly, these dynamics are often studied and discussed without an emphasis on cultural evolution, despite its potential importance for past and present biodiversity dynamics. Here, we investigate whether cultural filtering, defined as the impact of cultural evolution on species presence, has driven the range dynamics of five historically widespread megafauna taxa (Asiatic elephant, rhinoceroses, tiger, Asiatic black bear, and brown bear) across China over the past 2 millennia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPresently, China has the largest high-speed rail (HSR) system in the world. However, our understanding of the network structure of the world's largest HSR system remains largely incomplete due to the limited data available. In this study, a publicly available data source, namely, information from a ticketing website, was used to collect an exhaustive dataset on the stations and routes within the Chinese HSR system.
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