Baolei Zhang

• Laboratory Head at Shandong Normal University

Agricultural non-point source (NPS) pollution directly affects the quality of soil and water, ecological balance and human health, and is a key challenge to achieve sustainable environmental development and efficient resource management. Taking the Nansi Lake Basin (NLB) as the study area, this study explores the main sources of agricultural NPS po...

Urbanization radically alters the climatic environment and landscape patterns of urban areas, but its impact on the carbon sequestration capacity of vegetation remains uncertain. Given the limitations of current small-scale ground-based in situ experiments, the response of vegetation carbon sequestration capacity to urbanization and the factors inf...

Constructing an ecological security pattern (ESP) is an effective measure to solve current regional ecological problems, alleviate the contradiction between rapid urbanization and ecological protection, and provide an important spatial path for effective management of regional ecosystems. This study integrated the importance of ecosystem services,...

The industrial economy occupies a crucial position in China’s national economy, and industrial eco-efficiency (IEE) as a significant indicator of regional green development levels. Balancing the positive interaction between industrial economy and resource environment, and enhancing ecological efficiency in industrial development are vital for achie...

In the rapid development of air pollution over the past two decades in Shandong Province, it has played a detrimental role, causing severe damage to regional ecological security and public health. There has been little research at the county scale to explore the spatiotemporal causes and heterogeneity of PM2.5 pollution. This study utilizes a Geogr...

The prolonged dependence on industrial development has accentuated the cumulative effects of pollutants. Simultaneously, influenced by land construction activities and green space depletion, the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in cities has intensified year by year, jeopardizing the foundation of sustainable urban development. Prudent urban spatial...

Agriculture, as an important activity on which human beings depend for their livelihood, brings serious environmental problems while meeting the needs of human survival, among which agricultural non-point source (NPS) pollution is one of the most urgent environmental problems. This study quantitatively assessed the loading characteristics spatial a...

Air quality degradation has triggered a large-scale public health crisis globally. Existing machine learning techniques have been used to attempt the remote sensing estimates of PM2.5. However, many machine learning models ignore the spatial non-stationarity of predictive variables. To address this issue, this study introduces a Flexible Geographic...

Accurate and timely urban boundaries can effectively quantify the spatial characteristics of urban evolution and are essential for understanding the impacts of urbanization processes and land-use changes on the environment and biodiversity. Currently, there is a lack of long time-series, high-resolution, nationally consistent Chinese urban boundary...

The core areas of the urban heat island (CAUHI) are the most concentrated and closely associated with humans, and they are key to managing the urban heat island (UHI). It is widely acknowledged that one of the best ways to reduce the risk of UHI is the creation of urban green spaces (UGSs). However, most of the current studies are based on the grid...

Urban vibrancy is an important indicator of urban prosperity. Evaluating the correlation between urban vibrancy and housing prices is increasingly necessary. However, most studies have ignored the temporal characteristics of urban vibrancy and only considered its spatial nature. This study optimizes the identification model of urban vibrancy center...

Rapid urbanization has reduced the capacity of cities to mitigate and withstand disasters. Strengthening urban ecological resilience (ER) is important for improving urban self-organization. Geographical characteristics and developmental status of different cities lead to a more complex relationship between urbanization and ER. Using the three major...

Scientific estimation and dynamic monitoring on the heterogeneity of carbon emission from energy consumption (CEEC) is the basis for formulating and implementing regional carbon reduction strategies to realize the goal of carbon neutrality and high-quality development. This study analyzes the temporal and spatial differences of CEEC and its driving...

The intensity of human pressure (HP) has an important impact on the biodiversity and ecosystem services of nature reserves (NRs), and the conflict and the coordination between NRs and human activities are now key issues to solve in the construction of NR systems. This study improved and applied a human footprint (HF) model that considers population...

The urban heat island effect is an increasingly serious problem in urban areas. Previous studies suggest that spatial variation in the urban land surface temperature (LST) is determined by interactions among urban morphological factors, but few studies have explored the main factors that affect the LST in different seasons in complex urban areas, e...

The risk of compound drought heatwave events (CDHEs) and their persistence has intensified in recent decades and is expected to increase faster in the future. Projecting future changes in the CDHEs and the area of the cropland exposed to CDHEs under different scenarios is critical for climate adaptation and sustainable development. In this study, w...

Hyperspectral technology has proven to be an effective method for monitoring soil salt content (SSC). However, hyperspectral estimation capabilities are limited when the soil surface is partially vegetated. This work aimed to (1) quantify the influences of different fraction vegetation coverage (FVC) on SSC estimation by hyperspectra and (2) explor...

Intense human activities have led to profound changes in landscape patterns and ecological processes, generating certain ecological risks that seriously threaten human wellbeing. Ecological risk assessment from a landscape perspective has become an important tool for macroecosystem landscape management. This research improves the framework and indi...

Understanding the mechanisms that influence changes in ecosystem services (ESs) is critical to the sustainable management of ecosystems. However, existing studies ignore the different importance of influencing factors of ESs in different periods and do not consider the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of influence factors. In this study, we first quant...

Taking the lower Yellow River basin as the study area, this study aims to construct ecological networks to mitigate the negative impacts of rapid urbanization on the ecosystem. Ecological sources were identified based on morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA), habitat quality and landscape connectivity. The ecological resistance surface was...

Gaofen-2 (GF-2) imagery data has been playing an important role in environmental monitoring. However, the scarcity of spectral bands makes GF-2 difficult to use in soil salinity estimation. In this paper, we combined spectral and textual features for soil salinity estimation from GF-2 imagery. The spectral features comprised five classes of predict...

Although the sustainability of cultural heritage plays important roles in the inheritance of humans’ civilization and history, assessments of such fields is still limited. In this paper, the spatiotemporal analysis method and coupling coordination model were applied to assess the sustainability of cultural heritage in Shandong Province. Results sho...

Earthquake-induced landslides are one of the most dangerous secondary disasters in mountainous areas throughout the world. The nowcasting of coseismic landslides is crucial for planning land management, development, and urbanization in mountainous areas. Taking Wenchuan County in Western Sichuan Plateau (WPS) as the study area, a landslide inventor...

A heat risk assessment in complex urban areas is important to mitigate the impact of the urban heat island (UHI) and to accurately implement cooling measures. Previous studies have focused on a single 'heat source' or 'resident' oriented assessment method, with fewer assessments and lack of appropriate theoretical approaches that consider both the...

Globally, nations and regions have pushed for “green development (GD)”, a sustainable development strategy that considers the integrated growth of “economy–environment–society”. As it is an area of China that provides an ecological function and is an important energy base, it is necessary to explore the current situation and factors influencing GD...

Prompt and precise acknowledgement of surface change around subways is of considerable significance in urban rail protection and local environmental management. Research has proven the considerable potential of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images for detecting such information; however, previous studies have mostly focused on change intensity usi...

Wetland is one of the most critical ecosystems with various functions, it produces the highest ecosystem services value (ESV) per unit area among all land types, thus, its decline has become a global concern in recent years. Since the 21st century, many developing countries have been continuously encroaching on wetlands due to rapid economic and po...

The spatial distribution and accessibility of urban public service facilities affect socioeconomic factors in the lives of residents, especially housing prices. Given that most previous studies focus on the accessibility of a certain, single type of facility and its impact on housing prices, this research uses improved two-step floating catchment a...

The identification of conservation priority areas (CPAs) based on multiple ecosystem services (ESs) is a prerequisite and important basis for decision-makers in implementing regional ecological restoration. However, the trade-offs between different services pose great challenges to determining the locations of priority areas. Based on the identific...

Based on the daily minimum and maximum temperatures recorded on the North China Plain (NCP), in this research, we define independent hot days (IHDs), independent hot nights (IHNs), and concurrent hot days and nights (CDHNs) and analyse the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of these variables. Moreover, based on demographic data derived fr...

From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, studies on the microgeographies of epidemics have surged. However, studies have neglected the significant impact of multiple spatiotemporal units, such as report timestamps and spatial scales. This study examines three cities with localized COVID-19 resurgence after the first wave of the pandemic in...

Land use/land cover (LULC) and climate change are major driving forces that impact ecosystem services and affect human well-being directly and indirectly. Under the future interaction between LULC and climate change, the impact of different land management and climate change scenarios on water-related services is uncertain. Based on this, the CLUMo...

Human activities involving nature have various environmental impacts. The assessment of the spatial and temporal evolution of human activity intensity (HAI) and its driving forces is significant for determining the effects of human activities on regional ecological environments and regulating such activities. This research quantified the HAI of Chi...

Risk assessments for COVID-19 are the basis for formulating prevention and control strategies, especially at the micro scale. In a previous risk assessment model, various “densities” were regarded as the decisive driving factors of COVID-19 in the spatial dimension (population density, facility density, trajectory density, etc.). However, this conc...

Urban morphology is a crucial contributor to urban heat island (UHI) effects. However, few studies have explored the complex effect of 2D/3D urban morphology on UHIs from a multiscale perspective. In this study, we chose the central area of Jinan city, which is commonly known as the “furnace,” as the case study area. The 2D/3D urban morphology inde...

The frequent occurrence of local COVID-19 today gives a strong necessity to better understand the effects of "source-case" distance and gathering places, which are often considered to be the key factors of the localized spatial clustering of an epidemic. In this study, the localized spatial clustering of COVID-19 cases, which originated in the Xinf...

In the last few decades, land use/land cover (LULC) has changed significantly under the influence of local planning and policy implementation, and this has had a profound impact on the regional ecological environment. By taking the Hengduan Mountain region as the study area, this study considered the demands of various commodities and services and...

With the rapid development of urbanization, the disorderly expansion of land use for urban construction has led to increasingly severe spatial dislocations of ecological land and construction land, and the topic of rationally planning the scale of urban land use and controlling urban sprawl from the perspective of ecological security has become a c...

Rapid urbanization has aggravated the urban thermal risk and highlighted the urban heat island (UHI) effect. To improve understanding on the effect of urbanization on the UHI effect, it is essential to determine the relationship between the UHI effect and the complexities of urban function and landscape structure. For this purpose, 5116 urban funct...

This study aimed at assessing the stresses from land development in or around Yellow River Delta Nature Reserve (YRDNR) and identifying the impacted areas. Major land development types (reservoirs, pond, aquafarm, salt pan, road, residential land, industry land, farming land, and fishing land) in or around the YRDNR from 1995 to 2014 were identifie...

Long-term intensive land use/cover changes (LUCCs) of the Yellow River Delta (YRD) have been happening since the 1960s. The land use patterns of the LUCCs are crucial for bio-diversity conservation and/or sustainable development. This study quantified patterns of the LUCCs, explored the systematic transitions, and identified wetland change trajecto...

Non-point source (NPS) pollution is the main threat to regional water quality, and the estimation of NPS pollution load has become an important task for NPS pollution control in China. Combined with geographical information system (GIS), the long-term hydrologic impact assessment (L-THIA) model is used to evaluate the temporal-spatial changes of ch...

TaPRP, a proline rich protein (PRP) cDNA, was cloned by RT-PCR from winter wheat. Nucleotide sequence analysis showed TaPRP is composed of 1137 bp (378 amino acid residues with a Mr of 42.19 kD). TaPRP shows 92.6%, 89.3%, 73.0%, and 73.3% sequence homologies with PRP genes from wheat, sorghum, rice, and maize, respectively. The deduced protein incl...

Wetland is one of the most important ecosystems with varied functions and structures, and its loss has been a major issue. Wetland loss in Modern Yellow River Delta (MYRD) becomes a serious environmental problem, so its restoration attracts a great deal of attention from academia and governments. This article proposes a GIS-based multi-criteria com...

Accurate estimation of leaf chlorophyll content (LCC) has great significance in study of the winter wheat, which is important for indicating nutrition status and photosynthetic. Selecting the closed related variable is the key to LCC monitoring. The variable importance for projection (VIP), applied to little samples and strong correlation data, is...

Research on land use cover change (LUCC) has reached a mature stage and has formed a relatively complete scientific system. However, most studies analyzed the LUCC process from the view of land use types ignoring the integrality and systematicness of the land use system, which brought certain constraints to understanding the complexity and systemat...

With the wide application of support vector machine(SVM), the algorithm of using online learning for realizing regression had been developed furtherly. After the mathematical mode of direct support vector machine (DSVM) for regression was introduced which was of the learning capacity that was similar to least squares support vector machine but less...

The Three Gorges Project attracts worldwide attention because of the Three Gorges migrants, and the agriculture of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area is a foundation for the development of the Three Gorges migrants. The Three Gorges Reservoir Area is situated at the mountainous area with bad agricultural development conditions and relatively low level...

The coastal zone, the interface between the sea and the land, has a variety of characteristics, such as resource abundance, multiple services, ecological fragility and frequent occurrence of disasters. It has been under tremendous pressure from human activities, especially increasing sea reclamation in recent years. Sea reclamation, which is an eff...

Taking social statistic data as basic data, this paper extended the meaning of urban land uses, highlighted the meaning of urban land uses in modern urbanization, which includes direct, indirect and induced land uses, quantitatively simulated the indirect and induced land uses by the substitution method of agricultural consumption and urban carbon...

In mountainous areas, it is the undulant terrain, various types of geomorphic and land use that make the remote sensing images great metamorphism. Moreover, due to the elevation, there are many areas covered with shadow, clouds and snow that make the images more inaccurate. As a result, it would be very difficult to carry out auto-classification of...

The paper took TM/ETM+ Landsat images in the year of 1986, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003 as the main information sources and the scopes of Chongqing's construction land during each period were extracted automatically and accurately. The space-time expanding of construction in Chongqing city for the past 20 years was monitored. And then, the motiv...

By analyzing the topographic features of past landslides since 1980s and the main land-cover types (including change information) in landslide-prone area, modeled spatial distribution of landslide hazard in upper Minjiang River Basin was studied based on spatial analysis of GIS in this paper. Results of GIS analysis showed that landslide occurrence...

The study area, located in the southeast of Tibet along the Sichuan-Tibet highway, is a part of Palongzangbu River basin where mountain hazards take place frequently. On the ground of field surveying, historical data and previous research, a total of 31 debris flow gullies are identified in the study area and 5 factors are chosen as main parameters...

Taking TM images, ETM images, SPOT images, aerial photos and other remote sensing data as fundamental sources, this research makes a thorough investigation on landslides and debris flows in Sichuan Province, China, using the method of manual interpretation and taking topography maps as references after the processes of terrain correction, spectral...

Based on field survey located by GPS, it is obtained landslides' location and distribution information by the method of remote sensing in this paper. The vector data of environmental factors that breed and induce landslides such as the elevation, the slope, the vegetation cover, the lithology, the rainfall and so on are gained using GIS (geographic...

Modern cities and towns play as the central places of wealth accumulation for human-being, not only in the ways of settlement and material consumption as they were traditionally in ancient time, but also in the ways of social production and environmental pollution as they are mostly today. With such a transition, the meaning of land use for urbaniz...