Effects of landscape on thermal livability at the community scale based on fine-grained geographic information: A case study of Shenzhen.

In the current research, the question of how to modify the microclimate through landscape planning to create a livable thermal environment within a residential community area has not been clarified. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of landscape on thermal livability in 2980 communities in Shenzhen, and obtained the following findings: (1) the proportion of trees and the average building height were key indicators to determine the average land surface temperature (LST) of a community, while the two-dimensional building characteristics, particularly shape, similarity, and patch dominance, were mainly responsible for regulating the spatial distribution of LST within a community; (2) at the community scale, the cooling intensity of buildings was strongest when their average height was around 40-60 m, and cooling effect of trees was most pronounced when their proportion achieved 20 %; and (3) the LST threshold for thermal livability in Shenzhen was around 35 °C. In summer, a higher proportion of trees and grass, as well as buildings with higher average heights, larger volume ratios, and more complex three-dimensional structures were favorable to maintain a livable community thermal environment, while in winter, a lower proportion of trees was more encouraged.

Do adaptive policy adjustments deliver ecosystem-agriculture-economy co-benefits in land degradation neutrality efforts? Evidence from southeast coast of China.

Ecosystem restoration projects (ERPs) facilitate land degradation neutrality (LDN). However, the response dynamics and interactions of sectors within ecosystem-agriculture-economy nexus (EAEN) have not been sufficiently explored, which constrains the coordinated efficacy of LDN efforts. To bridge the knowledge gaps, the present study selected a land restoration hotspot in southeastern China as a case to investigate the simultaneous responses of the EAEN sectors to ERPs from a novel social-ecological system (SES)-based LDN perspective.

Nitrogen addition changes the canopy biological characteristics of dominant tree species in an evergreen broad-leaved forest.

Many studies have focused on the impact of nitrogen deposition on plants, but due to technical limitations, research on the responses of forest canopy to manipulated nitrogen deposition is relatively scarce. Based on a canopy nitrogen addition (CN) platform, this study used laboratory analysis and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) observations to assess the impact of CN on the canopy traits of dominant tree species (Engelhardia roxburghiana, Schima superba, and Castanea henryi) in an evergreen broad-leaved forest in China. The results showed that nitrogen application at 25 kg N ha y (CN25) and 50 kg N ha y (CN50) significantly increased the actual net photosynthetic rate (A) of all the three tree species.

Water optical properties over or around coral reefs in the coastal region: implications for coral reef remote sensing.

Coral reefs inhabit clear oceanic-type waters to turbid coastal regimes. For shallow coastal water environments, the coral reefs from remote sensing will be substantially influenced by the complexity and heterogeneity of the optical properties of water. Through a set of bio-optical and chemical measurements in July 2019 around Xidao Island, Sanya, China, we explored spatial variations of water components' concentrations (including suspended solids, phytoplankton, and dissolved organic carbon) and the optical absorptions (i.

Distinctive transnational city-to-city partnerships, decentralization, and local governance of China as a Global East Country.

Against the background of globalisation and state rescaling, promoting decentralisation and enhancing local governance capacity have become prioritised objectives of transnational city-to-city partnerships mainly between developed and developing countries. However, considering the critical debates on Global East's uniqueness, two questions emerge when studying the transnational partnerships of Chinese cities. (1) Are Chinese cities' partnership establishments and objectives remarkably different from the existing international body of knowledge? (2) In China, whether decentralisation and local governance are promoted by city-to-city transnational partnerships as well? To cope with the questions, this paper examines 28 Chinese world cities' partnership establishments and objectives and reaches two conclusions.

Data error propagation in stacked bioclimatic envelope models.

Stacking is the process of overlaying inferred species potential distributions for multiple species based on outputs of bioclimatic envelope models (BEMs). The approach can be used to investigate patterns and processes of species richness. If data limitations on individual species distributions are inevitable, but how do they affect inferences of patterns and processes of species richness? We investigate the influence of different data sources on estimated species richness gradients in China.

Social carrying capacity and emotion dynamics in urban national parks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlabelled: The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the mobility, accessibility, and behaviors of visitors dramatically. Under the impact of COVID-19, the social carrying capacity and emotion dynamics in parks and recreation areas are expected to change due to the uncertainty of health risks associated with visitors' behaviors. This study conducted an on-site visitor survey at Leiqiong Global Geological Park, a national park located in urban-proximate areas in Haikou, China.

Retrieval of Leaf Chlorophyll Contents (LCCs) in Litchi Based on Fractional Order Derivatives and VCPA-GA-ML Algorithms.

The accurate estimation of leaf chlorophyll content (LCC) is a significant foundation in assessing litchi photosynthetic activity and possible nutrient status. Hyperspectral remote sensing data have been widely used in agricultural quantitative monitoring research for the non-destructive assessment of LCC. Variable selection approaches are crucial for analyzing high-dimensional datasets due to the high danger of overfitting, time-intensiveness, or substantial computational requirements.

Optimized multilateral crop trade patterns can effectively mitigate phosphorus imbalance among the involved countries.

Phosphorus imbalance for cropland can greatly influence environmental quality and productivity of agricultural systems. Resolving cropland phosphorus imbalance may be possible with more efficient multilateral crop trade within the involved trading countries; however, the driving mechanisms are unclear. This study calculates phosphorus budgets in China and five central Asian countries and proposes two optimal multilateral crop trade models to mitigate the phosphorus imbalance.

Achieving balance between socioeconomic development and ecosystem conservation via policy adjustments in Guangdong Province of southeastern China.

Rapid urbanization improves socioeconomic development but challenges ecosystem sustainability. Meanwhile, the gradient responses of ecosystem services (ESs) to landscape structures and associated regime shifts of the agriculture-ecosystem-economy nexus (AEEN) have not been sufficiently addressed, preventing an effective balance between socioeconomic prosperity and ecosystem conservation. To bridge this knowledge gap, this study selected the Guangdong Province of southeastern China to explore landscape dynamics from 1985 to 2020 and their spatially heterogeneous impacts on ESs and the AEEN, based on Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs approach and other biophysical models as well as statistical records about socioeconomic factors.

Biophysical impacts of earth greening can substantially mitigate regional land surface temperature warming.

Vegetation change can alter surface energy balance and subsequently affect the local climate. This biophysical impact has been well studied for forestation cases, but the sign and magnitude for persistent earth greening remain controversial. Based on long-term remote sensing observations, we quantify the unidirectional impact of vegetation greening on radiometric surface temperature over 2001-2018.

Assessment of the urban waterlogging resilience and identification of its driving factors: A case study of Wuhan City, China.

With rapid urbanization and extreme rainstorm events associated with climate change, urban waterlogging has become one of the most frequent and severe disasters globally. In this study, a multi-dimensional and multi-process index system based on the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) framework was developed to measure the level of urban waterlogging resilience (UWR). The spatial distribution of UWR on a block scale was explored based on the entropy weight method with the natural breakpoint method (EWM-NBM) in the central district of Wuhan City, China.

Mapping a Country Image from Global News Reports about COVID-19 Pandemic.

Unlabelled: The outbreak of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has infected hundreds of millions of people worldwide and caused millions of deaths. This study used media analysis and correlation analysis to elucidate the significant differences in the ways in which news reports from 228 countries discussed a specific country when covering the COVID-19 pandemic. Media reports analysed in this study were collected from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone project (GDELT).

Enhancing sustainability of vegetation ecosystems through ecological engineering: A case study in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Ecological engineering is an important measure to promote ecosystem adaptation and restoration to deal with environmental change and human disturbance. To assess the effectiveness of ecological construction and analyze the influencing factors of ecosystem changes in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP), this study detected the spatial changes and dynamic hotspots of vegetation ecosystems in the ecological construction regions of the QTP (QTPE) and regions without ecological construction (QTPWE) using hot spot analysis and comprehensive dynamic degree model. Then the random forest (RF) model and geographical weighted regression model were used to study the degree and spatial heterogeneity of impacts of climate and human activities on normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI).

Sub-Block Urban Function Recognition with the Integration of Multi-Source Data.

The recognition of urban functional areas (UFAs) is of great significance for the understanding of urban structures and urban planning. Due to the limitation of data sources, early research was characterized by problems such as singular data, incomplete results, and inadequate consideration of the socioeconomic environment. The development of multi-source big data brings new opportunities for dynamic recognition of UFAs.

Analysis of microplastics in soils on the high-altitude area of the Tibetan Plateau: Multiple environmental factors.

Microplastics (MPs), a class of emerging contaminants, are ubiquitous in the environment, but limited information is known about them in remote terrestrial environment at high-altitude areas with inconvenient traffic and sparsely populated. In this study, 54 soil samples were collected from various land use patterns (greenhouse, ordinary farmland, grassland, and bare land) in western area of the Tibetan Plateau to determine the influence of land use type, altitude, meteorological parameters, and distance from the road edge on MP distribution. The MP abundance ranged from 0 (not detected) to 190 items/kg, with an average number of 64.

Factors Influencing O Concentration in Traffic and Urban Environments: A Case Study of Guangzhou City.

Ozone (O) pollution is a serious issue in China, posing a significant threat to people's health. Traffic emissions are the main pollutant source in urban areas. NO and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from traffic emissions are the main precursors of O.

Automatic Meter Reading from UAV Inspection Photos in the Substation by Combining YOLOv5s and DeeplabV3.

The combination of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and artificial intelligence is significant and is a key topic in recent substation inspection applications; and meter reading is one of the challenging tasks. This paper proposes a method based on the combination of YOLOv5s object detection and Deeplabv3+ image segmentation to obtain meter readings through the post-processing of segmented images. Firstly, YOLOv5s was introduced to detect the meter dial area and the meter was classified.

Direct and indirect impacts of urbanization on vegetation growth across the world's cities.

Urban environments, regarded as "harbingers" of future global change, may exert positive or negative impacts on urban vegetation growth. Because of limited ground-based experiments, the responses of vegetation to urbanization and its associated controlling factors at the global scale remain poorly understood. Here, we use satellite observations from 2001 to 2018 to quantify direct and indirect impacts of urbanization on vegetation growth in 672 worldwide cities.

Linking land degradation and restoration to ecosystem services balance by identifying landscape drivers: insights from the globally largest loess deposit area.

Land degradation is one of the most serious environmental challenges that profoundly affects ecosystem services (ESs), which further threaten ecosystem sustainability. However, few studies have been committed to sufficiently explore the relationship between land degradation neutrality (LDN) and the ES balance of supply and demand sides, as well as their spatial disparities and determinants. To fill the knowledge gaps, this study quantifies land dynamics and ES balance through biophysical models and an expert knowledge matrix, respectively, and explores the spatial determinants through an integrated regression method.

The Importance of Energy Theory in Shaping Elevational Species Richness Patterns in Plants.

Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain elevational species richness patterns; however, evaluating their importance remains a challenge, as mountains that are nested within different biogeographic regions have different environmental attributes. Here, we conducted a comparative study for trees, shrubs, herbs, and ferns along the same elevational gradient for 22 mountains worldwide, examining the performance of hypotheses of energy, tolerance, climatic variability, and spatial area to explain the elevational species richness patterns for each plant group. Results show that for trees and shrubs, energy-related factors exhibit greater explanatory power than other factors, whereas the factors that are associated with climatic variability performed better in explaining the elevational species richness patterns of herbs and ferns.

[Characteristics and driving forces of vegetation dynamics in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region from 1992 to 2018].

Human activities related with construction and destruction are one of the important drivers for vegetation dynamics. Using remote sensing to explore the quantitative monitoring process and driving force of vegetation succession can well reveal the impacts of human activities on ecological background. Based on the vegetation formation group and vegetation formation scales, this study used the European Space Agency's annual land cover data and geo-information TUPU analysis to investigate vegetation succession direction, succession speed, and succession sequence in the Inner Mongolia from 1992 to 2018.