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Publications (810)
Hydropower, an important renewable energy source worldwide, is threatened by reservoir sedimentation. Ecological restoration (ER) can mitigate this by reducing upstream sediment, thereby extending hydropower facilities’ lifespan. However, ER may also reduce runoff, potentially diminishing energy generation and complicating its overall impact on hyd...
Spring vegetation phenology (green‐up onset date, GUD) exhibits notable sensitivity to climate change, serving as a critical indicator of ecosystem dynamics. However, long‐term changes and drivers of GUD remain unclear. Here we showed that satellite‐derived GUD averaged over China forests and grasslands advanced by −1.3 ± 0.4 (mean ± SD) days decad...
Soil moisture is coupled with vegetation and atmosphere, influencing global cycling of water, carbon, and energy. However, it remains unclear how soil moisture-atmosphere interactions affect land-atmosphere carbon and water exchanges simultaneously. Using Earth system model experiments, we show widespread carbon-water trade-offs between net ecosyst...
Aim
Seed mass is a key reproductive trait and is closely related to seed dispersal, germination, seedling growth and competition capability. Characterising the geographical pattern and the primary factors of seed mass variation is crucial for understanding plant reproductive strategy under heterogeneous environments. However, how the environment, p...
Ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE) and carbon use efficiency (CUE) are critical parameters to determine the trade-off between water consumption and carbon sequestration in drylands. However, the roles of vegetation cover, climate factors and soil moisture in affecting the coupling of WUE and CUE were still poorly understood. This study combined t...
Litter decomposition is essential in linking aboveground and belowground carbon, nutrient cycles, and energy flows within ecosystems. This process has been profoundly impacted by global change, particularly in drylands, which are highly susceptible to both anthropogenic and natural disturbances. However, a significant knowledge gap remains concerni...
Afforestation represents an effective approach for ecosystem restoration and carbon (C) sequestration. Nonetheless, it poses notable challenges concerning water depletion and soil drought in (semi)arid regions. The underlying mechanisms regulating the influence of afforestation on soil carbon‐water dynamics, particularly how deep soil C reacts to a...
The One Health (OH) approach, integrating aspects of human, animal, and environmental health, still lacks robustly quantified insights into its complex relationships. To fill this knowledge gap, we devised a comprehensive assessment scheme for OH to assess its progress, synergies, trade-offs, and priority targets. From 2000 to 2020, we find evidenc...
Telecoupling interactions between social–ecological systems across large, often global distances drive negative impacts from the forest-based carbon market. However, these negative impacts have been underreported and, therefore, have likely been vastly underestimated. We identify how these unintended negative impacts may occur and provide recommend...
The many complex interconnections among countries driven by natural and socioeconomic processes have a crucial impact on regional and global sustainability, yet a robust and systematic way to quantify this impact is lacking. Here we introduce two complementary approaches to bridge this key methodological gap. The first entails constructing a new su...
Land degradation from water erosion poses a significant threat to water security and ecosystem stability, driving global efforts in soil conservation. Quantitative assessment of soil conservation benefits—both on-site and off-site—is crucial for guiding effective conservation strategies. However, existing methodologies often fall short in quantifyi...
Increasing aridity can sharply reduce vegetation productivity in drylands, but elevated CO2 and warming can enhance vegetation growth. However, the extent to which these positive effects counteract the negative effects of heightened aridity on vegetation productivity remains uncertain. Here, we used space-for-time substitution to assess the respons...
Grasslands support multiple ecosystem functions and services, and diverse biota, and are critical for human well-being. Grazing is the most pervasive land use in grasslands, but can have damaging effects when poorly managed. How grazing management and the environment interact to affect ecosystem functions globally is less well understood. Addressin...
Alpine grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are highly vulnerable to various treatments and face significant degradation risks due to global environmental changes. However, the response of these grasslands to different external treatments remains uncertain, and the patterns behind functional group responses are unclear, impeding our ability to re...
Agricultural production and sustainable human livelihoods in large river basins are threatened by climate change, human activities, and resource constraints. However, due to the complexity of socio-ecological interactions and agricultural sustainability, current studies are still limited by a priori knowledge and systematic analyses, as well as by...
Compound hot–dry events cause more severe impacts on terrestrial ecosystems than dry events, while the differences in recovery time (ΔRT) between hot–dry and dry events and their contributing factors remain unclear. Both remote sensing observations and eddy covariance measurements reveal that hot–dry events prolong the recovery time compared with d...
As research on the full spectrum of ecosystem service (ES) generation and utilization within coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) has expanded, many studies have shown that the spatiotemporal dynamics of ESs are managed and influenced by human activities. However, there is insufficient research on how ESs are affected by bidirectional coupling...
Establishing and maintaining protected areas is a pivotal strategy for attaining the post-2020 biodiversity target. The conservation objectives of protected areas have shifted from a narrow emphasis on biodiversity to encompass broader considerations such as ecosystem stability, community resilience to climate change, and enhancement of human well-...
Sustainable development depends on the integration of the economy, society, and environment. Yet, escalating environmental challenges pose threats to both society and the economy. Despite progress in addressing environmental issues to promote sustainability, knowledge gaps in scientific research, technological advancement, engineering practice, and...
Land‒atmosphere coupling intensifies the vulnerability of ecosystems in drylands. However, whether and how ecological restoration would modify the land‒atmosphere coupling across drylands remains unclear. To address these gaps, here we use structural equation model to separate two pathways of land‒atmosphere coupling: vegetation and soil moisture p...
Establishing planted forests (PF) by afforestation and naturally regenerating forests (NF) are important measures of enhance carbon (C) sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems. However, the difference of biomass C stocks and allocation between NF and PF and their determinants in water-limited areas remain unclear. To address this gap, we conducted...
Resistance and resilience are widely used to characterize ecosystem drought stability. Tradeoff between resistance and resilience have been reported, but its long‐term trends remain uncertain at global scale. Based on remotely sensed vegetation indices, we assessed the spatiotemporal dynamics of drought resistance and resilience. Result revealed th...
Nature's contributions to people (NCP) encompass both the beneficial and detrimental effects of living nature on human quality of life, including regulatory, material, and non-material contributions. Globally, vital NCPs have been deteriorating, accelerated by changes in both natural and anthropogenic drivers over recent decades. Despite the often...
Telecoupling, interactions between social-ecological systems across large, often global, distances, drives negative impacts from the forest-based carbon market. Yet, these negative impacts have been underreported; and therefore, likely vastly underestimated. We identify how these unintended negative impacts may occur and provide recommendations for...
The impact of global climate change on mountainous regions with significant elevational gaps is complex and often unpredictable. In particular, alpine grassland ecosystems, are experiencing changes in their spatial patterns along elevational gradients, which increases their vulnerability to degradation. Therefore, a more detailed understanding of s...
Trait-based approaches are of increasing concern in predicting vegetation changes and linking ecosystem structures to functions at large scales. However, a critical challenge for such approaches is acquiring spatially continuous plant functional trait maps. Here, six key plant functional traits were selected as they can reflect plant resource acqui...
Terrestrial ecosystem resilience is crucial for maintaining the structural and functional stability of ecosystems following disturbances. However, changes in resilience over the past few decades and the risk of future resilience loss under ongoing climate change are unclear. Here, we identified resilience trends using two remotely sensed vegetation...
Monitoring the long-term dynamics of the wet season is important for both the current operation and future management of water resource systems. Wet seasons in China are substantially influenced by monsoons with great variability but are unknown. We conducted a comprehensive assessment of rainfall regimes in China between 1982 and 2020 using a modi...
The Tibetan grassland ecosystems possess significant carbon sink potential and have room for improved carbon sequestration processes. There is a need to uncover more ambitious and coherent solutions (e.g., Nature-based Solutions) to increase carbon sequestration. Here, we investigated the rationale and urgency behind the implementation of Nature-ba...
Differences in progress across sustainable development goals (SDGs) are widespread globally; meanwhile, the rising call for prioritizing specific SDGs may exacerbate such gaps. Nevertheless, how these progress differences would influence global sustainable development has been long neglected. Here, we present the first quantitative ssessment of SDG...
Climate change and anthropogenic activities are reshaping dryland ecosystems globally at an unprecedented pace, jeopardizing their stability. The stability of these ecosystems is crucial for maintaining ecological balance and supporting local communities. Yet, the mechanisms governing their stability are poorly understood, largely due to the scarci...
China has one of the largest dryland areas worldwide, covering 6.6 million km ² and supporting approximately 580 million people. Conflicting findings showing a drier China’s drylands with increasing aridity and observed greenness indicate the complexity of environmental processes, highlighting a pressing research need to improve understanding of ho...
In light of the escalating pace and heightened intensity of contemporary climate change and human interventions, a more systematic and comprehensive approach to research has become imperative for the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within dryland regions. In 2017, a collaborative research consortium comprising experts from d...
The framework of the Global Dryland Ecosystem Programme (Global-DEP) combines the ecosystem service (ES) research paradigm and system dynamics thinking. The core of the framework is the resilience of social-ecological systems (SESs) in drylands. This resilience depends on the interaction between ecological and social subsystems. Water shortages, de...
As common pursuits of human society, subjective well-being (SWB) strongly depends on economic factors, and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize promoting equilibrium between socio-economic development and environmental conservation. Therefore, trade-offs between narrowing existing progress differences across SDGs and improving SWB...
Climate change is expected to lead to greater variability in precipitation and drought in different regions. However, the responses of ecosystem carbon and water cycles (i.e., water use efficiency, WUE) to different levels of drought stress are not fully understood. Here, we examined the relationship between WUE and precipitation anomalies and iden...
Water governance in river basins worldwide faces challenges due to complex socio-economic and environmental factors. In the Yellow River Basin (YRB), two major institutional shifts, the 1987 Water Allocation Scheme (87-WAS) and the 1998 Unified Basin Regulation (98-UBR), aimed to address water allocation and usage issues. This study quantifies the...
Terrestrial ecosystems can exhibit various behaviors in response to climate change and human activities. Nonlinear and abrupt shifts in ecosystems are particularly important as they indicate substantial modifications in ecosystem structure and function, posing a threat to the provision of ecosystem services. Here we distinguish between linear, curv...
Compound droughts with low soil moisture (SM) and high vapor pressure deficit (VPD) pose significant threats to terrestrial carbon sink and agricultural production. However, the frequency and intensity of compound droughts and their adverse impacts on the carbon cycle remain highly uncertain. Here, we define and identify vegetation compound drought...
Climate change has led to anomalous fluctuations in extreme streamflow from global river systems, and the su-perposition of human activities such as damming has compounded the changes in extreme streamflow, affecting floods and river ecosystems. However, muti-temporal scale variations of extreme streamflow and the dominant driving factors were limi...
Water governance determines “who gets water, when, and how” in most large river basins. Shifts in water governance regimes from natural to social‐ecological or “hydrosocial” carry profound implications for human wellbeing; identifying regime changes in water governance is critical to navigating social‐ecological transitions and guiding sustainabili...
Drylands are important carbon pools and are highly vulnerable to climate change, particularly in the context of increasing aridity. However, there has been limited research on the effects of aridification on soil total carbon including soil organic carbon and soil inorganic carbon, which hinders comprehensive understanding and projection of soil ca...
Changes in heat and moisture significantly co-alter ecosystem functioning. However, knowledge on dynamics of ecosystem responses to climate change is limited. Here, we quantify long-term ecosystem sensitivity based on weighted ratios of vegetation productivity variability and multiple climate variables from satellite observations, greater values of...
The rapid shrinkage and salinization of the Aral Sea over the last few decades has precipitated an environmental disaster, with widespread implications for people whose livelihoods depend on it. Although debated extensively, few viable strategies have yet been identified for reviving the Aral Sea. Here, we propose a hydro‐eco‐social framework to de...
Drylands are particularly sensitive to climate change, and soil water availability is critical for dryland ecosystems. Climate change and large-scale ecological restoration have led to significant vegetation greening and soil moisture (SM) variations in the drylands. However, the influencing mechanisms of climate change and vegetation greening on S...
Diagnosing the spatial interaction between urbanization and ecosystem services (ES) is of guiding significance for regional sustainable development. The complex spatial interactions mechanism between different types of urbanization and ES during historical and future periods were rarely explored at the whole watershed scale. To fill this gap, we sy...
Recent concurrent processes of vegetation greening and reduced resilience (the capacity to recover from disturbances) worldwide have brought many uncertainties into sustainable ecosystems in the future. However, little is known about the conditions and extent to which greening affects resilience changes. Here we assess both vegetation dynamics and...
Unraveling the complexity of the 17 interacting sustainable development goals (SDGs) is crucial for their achievement. Empirically revealing the dimensions of the SDGs helps generalize the dominant features of SDGs and better understand their drivers. Here, using a database of 166 countries’ progress toward achieving each individual SDG, we found t...
Ecosystem services (ES) are the direct and indirect benefits people obtain from ecosystems, serving as a bridge linking ecological systems and social-economic systems. The quantitative assessment of the dynamic changes in ES and their relationships and the identification of the driving forces behind them have recently become a research hotspot. How...
Facing the dual threats of climate and socioeconomic changes, how Tibet can seize the opportunity for ecological restoration to enhance environmental quality while improving the relationship between humans and nature is of great significance for regional sustainable development.
Situated in an ecologically vulnerable area, the cognitive structure o...
Grassland ecosystem functions are affected by global climate change and increasing aridity. Belowground components of soil and vegetation, such as specific root length, belowground biomass and soil organic carbon are important for maintaining these functions. However, aridity affects these components in different ways. This research evaluates chang...
The multifunctionality and sustainability of ecosystems are strongly dependent on their ability
to withstand and recover from disturbances—that is, ecosystem resilience (ER). However, the
dynamics and attributes of ER remain largely unknown, especially in China, where climatic
and anthropogenic pressures are high. In this study, we evaluated spatio...
Soil erosion is mainly affected by the rainfall characteristics and land cover conditions, and soil erosion modelling is important for evaluating land degradation status. The revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) have been widely used to simulate soil loss rate. Previous studies usually considered the general rainfall characteristics and dir...
Degradation of ecosystems can occur when certain ecological thresholds are passed below which ecosystem responses remain within ‘safe ecological limits’. Ecosystems such as drylands are sensitive to both aridification and grazing, but the combined effects of such factors on the emergence of ecological thresholds beyond which ecosystem degradation o...
Extensive efforts have been dedicated to deciphering the interactions associated with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, these developments are hampered by a lack of efficient strategies to avoid beneficial synergies being offset by harmful trade-offs. To fill these gaps, we used causal diagnosis and network analysis methods to construc...
黄河流域生态保护和高质量发展已上升为国家战略。2021年《黄河流域生态保护和高质量发展规划纲要》的发布与实施，促使黄土高原生态建设进入了生态治理成效巩固、经济社会发展转型的关键期。文章系统总结了黄土高原生态建设与社会经济发展的现状特点和主要问题，从生态系统稳定性和可持续性提升、社会经济系统绿色转型、国土空间科学布局、全流域统筹协调治理等方面提出对策建议，为黄土高原乃至黄河流域生态保护和高质量发展提供科技支撑。
The ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin has been prioritized as a national strategy. The release and...
1. The social–ecological trap is an emerging concept that describes situations in which self- reinforcing social and ecological feedbacks maintain or push a social–ecological system towards an undesirable state and threaten the sustainability of human societies. Understanding a system's feedback loops and identifying the leading factors of such tra...
Eco-civilization, as a civilizational discourse led by China, implies the next stage of civilization after industrial civilization, the essence of which is to respect, conform to, and protect nature. Although the international community is paying more attention to eco-civilization, the existing literature still lacks a systematic discussion of whic...
Ecological stability is a critical factor in global sustainable development, yet its significance has been overlooked. Here we introduce a landscape-oriented framework to evaluate ecological stability in the Qingzang Plateau (QP). Our findings reveal a medium-high stability level in the QP, with minimal changes over recent years. The driving factor...
Changes in heat and moisture significantly co-alter ecosystem functioning. However, knowledge on the dynamics of ecosystem responses to climate change is limited. Here, we quantify long-term ecosystem sensitivity (ES) based on weighted ratios of vegetation productivity variability and multiple climate variables from satellite observations, greater...
The UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030) provides a new momentum for scaling up ecosystem restoration efforts to landscape restoration. China’s recent experience with transformative investment in landscape restoration provides invaluable guidance for the world. We retrospectively reviewed the scientific evidence on the responses of physic...
Climate change and human activities are changing the structure and function of dryland ecosystems at unprecedented rate, thus threatening the stability of ecosystems. The stability of dryland ecosystems is vital for ecological security and local livelihoods. However, the mechanisms that underlie ecosystem stability in drylands remain uncertain due...
Trait-based approaches are of increasing concern in predicting vegetation changes and linking ecosystem structure to functions at large scales. However, a critical challenge for such approaches is acquiring spatially continuous plant functional trait distribution. Here, eight key plant functional traits were selected to represent two-dimensional sp...
Protected areas are essential for the conservation of biodiversity, natural and cultural resources, and contribute to regional and global sustainable development. However, since authorities and stakeholders concern more on the conservation targets of protected areas, how to better evaluate the protected areas' contributions to sustainable developme...
Understanding how to identify priority conservation areas for biodiversity and ecosystem services (ESs) is crucial for nature reserve (NR) optimization and regional planning. This study reports a regional assessment in Qinghai Province of China, quantifying the biodiversity and the provision of four ESs (carbon sequestration-net primary productivit...
Riverine water and sediment discharge drive global material circulation and energy transfer, and they are crucial to the biogeochemical cycle. We investigated the changes in water-sediment fluxes in six major rivers from north to south in China from the mid-1950s to 2020 under the influence of climate change and human activities, and quantified the...
In recent decades, the increasing frequency and magnitude of extreme hydrological events due to climate change and human activities have caused substantial economic losses and damages to human wellbeing. Here, we investigated the spatiotemporal variations of streamflow extremes (QE) and sediment load extremes (SE) in the Yellow River (YR) during 19...
Increasing aridity and grazing have multifaceted effects on the ecosystem, of which plant traits interact with each other to coregulate the productivity function including above-and below-ground compartments of plant. The ecological interaction network among plant traits could reflect how ecosystem interact with, influence, and respond to environme...
Dissolved carbon (DC) and dissolved nitrogen (DN) driven by rainfall partitioning are critical components of carbon and nitrogen cycles in terrestrial ecosystems, especially in vegetation restoration areas. However, the variations of DC and DN fluxes in the input (throughfall and stemflow) and output (infiltration and surface runoff) water pathways...
Vegetation restoration is effective at combating soil erosion. The intensity distribution within rainfall events (rainfall pattern) has undergone evident variations under global change, which was crucial for hydrological and erosive processes. However, the responses of runoff and soil loss to natural rainfall patterns under restored vegetation are...
The expansion of construction land due to urbanization is the most rapid land use change in contemporary human history and has always occupied high-quality cropland, posing a severe threat to cropland and food security, it's essential to clarify the impact of urbanization on cropland and food security. This study proposed a research framework based...
Over the past decades, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events due to climate change and anthropogenic climate change have greatly increased the threat to the production and livelihood of people along the riverbank. Hence, it is crucial to analyze the extreme variations of streamflow and sediment load observed in large rivers to be...
Synergistically maintain or enhance the numerous beneficial contributions of nature to the quality of human life is an important but challenging question for achieving Sustainable Development Goals. However, the spatiotemporal distributions of global nature's contributions to people (NCPs) and their interactions remain unclear. We built a rapid ass...
Human activities and environmental change can impact the supply of ecosystem services (ESs) as pressures. Understanding the mechanisms of these impacts is crucial to support ecological conservation and restoration policy and applications. In this study, we highlighted the contribution of vegetation to mitigating these impacts on ESs in the Qinghai-...
