Temporal Stability of Vegetation Cover across the Loess Plateau Based on GIMMS during 1982-2013.

The Loess Plateau, covering approximately 640,000 km, has experienced the most severe soil erosion in the world. A greening tendency has been noticed since implementing the Grain to Green Program (GTGP), which may prevent further soil erosion. Therefore, understanding the underpinning basis of greening stability and persistence is important for sustainable improvement.

Remote Sensing Greenness and Urbanization in Ecohydrological Model Analysis: Asia and Australasia (1982-2015).

Linking remote sensing information and ecohydrological models to improve understanding of terrestrial biosphere responses to climate and land use change has become the subject of increased interest due to the impacts of current global changes and the effect on the sustainability of human lifestyles. An application to Asia and Australasia (1982-2015) is presented, revealing the following results: (i) The broad distribution of regions with the enhanced vegetation greenness only follows the general pattern as for the whole, without obvious dependence on regional or climate fluxes ratios. That indicates a prevailing increasing greenness over land due to both the impacts of current global changes and the sustainability of human lifestyles; (ii) regions with vegetation greenness reduction reveal a unique distribution, concentrating in the water-limited domain due to the impacts of external (climatically "dry gets drier and wet gets wetter") and internal (anthropogenically increased evaporation) changes; (iii) the external changes of dryness diverge at the boundary separating energy from water-limited regimes, and the internal changes indicate large-scale afforestation and deforestation) that occur mainly in China and Russia due to a conservation program and illegal logging, respectively, and a massive conversion of tropical forest to industrial tree plantations in Southeast Asia, leading to an increased evaporation.

Causality of Biodiversity Loss: Climate, Vegetation, and Urbanization in China and America.

Essential for directing conservation resources is to identify threatened vertebrate regions and diagnose the underlying causalities. Through relating vertebrates and threatened vertebrates to the rainfall-runoff chain, to the food chain, and to the human impact of urbanization, the following relationships are noticed: (i) The Earth's vertebrates generally show increasing abundance and decreasing threatened species indicator (threatened species number/species abundance) for a higher Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) or larger city-size. (ii) Regional vertebrates reveal a notable 'U-shape profile' ('step-like jump') of threatened species indicator occurs in the moderate (high) NDVI regions in China (America).

Urbanization and climate change: Insights from eco-hydrological diagnostics.

To quantify how urbanization induced long-term changes have altered the evolution of urban climate, a novel eco-hydrological diagnostic is introduced and applied globally, to a developing and a developed country (China and US-America). Urban areas are (i) geographically identified by remote sensing based nighttime light, (ii) physically embedded in state spaces spanned by suitable combinations of surface energy and water fluxes comprising the rainfall-runoff chain, and (iii) dynamically characterized by the time evolution of the surface fluxes at geographically fixed locations, analyzed as trajectories in state space, and interpreted by an attribution model separating anthropogenic from climate induced causes. The results describe the long term climatological settings of urban areas in a net radiation versus dryness diagram, while the attribution of change is diagnosed in a state space spanned by energy and water excess: (i) Cities in China are characterized by a bi-modal distribution separated by the boundary between water and energy-limited (northern and southern) regimes while US-American cities are assembling unimodally on this boundary, and globally the urbanized areas are also aligned along this boundary between water and energy-limited regimes.

Urbanization and the thermal environment of Chinese and US-American cities.

Urbanization induced change of the thermal environment of cities is analyzed using MODIS LST and DMSP/OLS nighttime light data sets (2001-2012) to a) extend previous studies on individual megacities to a city size spectrum; b) investigate the heterogeneous surface thermal environment associated with the urbanization processes in terms of nighttime light intensity and city size; and c) provide insights in predicting how urban ecosystems will respond to urbanization for both a developing and a developed country (China and US-America), and on global scale. The following results are obtained: i) Nighttime light intensities of both countries (and globally) increase with increasing city size. ii) City size dependent annual or seasonal mean temperature tendencies show the urban effect by decreasing daytime and increasing nighttime mean temperatures (particularly in China) while variability can be related to climate fluctuations.

Land desertification monitoring and assessment in Yulin of Northwest China using remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS).

The objective of this study is to develop techniques for assessing and analysing land desertification in Yulin of Northwest China, as a typical monitoring region through the use of remotely sensed data and geographic information systems (GIS). The methodology included the use of Landsat TM data from 1987, 1996 and 2006, supplemented by aerial photos in 1960, topographic maps, field work and use of other existing data. From this, land cover, the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), farmland, woodland and grassland maps at 1:100,000 were prepared for land desertification monitoring in the area.

Regularized inversion method for retrieval of aerosol particle size distribution function in W(1,2) space.

A determination of the aerosol particle size distribution function by using the particle spectrum extinction equation is an ill-posed integral equation of the first kind. To overcome this, we must incorporate regularization techniques. Most of the literature focuses on the Phillips-Twomey regularization or its variations.

Landscape dynamitic change in Mu Us Desert derived from Landsat TM data.

Landscape ecology emphasizes large areas and ecological effects of the spatial patterning of ecosystem. Recent developments in landscape ecology have emphasized the important relationship between spatial patterns and many ecological processes. Quantitative methods in landscape ecology link spatial patterns and ecological processes at broad spatial and temporal scales.