Calvin K. F. Lee

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at The University of Hong Kong

Rain‐triggered landslides cause significant socioeconomic loss and long‐term ecological impact, disrupting topsoil and seed banks and creating unfavourable conditions for vegetation establishment. Although hazard management effectively reduces landslide risk, most management plans primarily focus on the societal impacts (loss of property and human...

Urbanization and land cover change are significantly affecting the availability of habitats for wildlife worldwide. However, linking species persistence to large-scale habitat changes is challenging, especially when wildlife monitoring data is lacking. In China, the Eurasian otter ( Lutra lutra ) is a species of conservation concern and is listed a...

Accurate monitoring of tropical leaf phenology, such as the leaf-on/off status, at both individual and ecosystem scales is essential for understanding and modelling tropical forest carbon and water cycles, and their sensitivity to climate change. The discrepancy between tree-crown size and pixel size (i.e., spatial resolution) across orbital sensor...

Ecosystem degradation is a key challenge that human society faces, as ecosystems provide services that are tied to human well‐being. Particularly, mangrove ecosystems provide important services to communities but are suffering heavy degradation, loss and potential collapse due to anthropogenic activities. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems is a transp...

Urbanization and land cover change are significantly affecting the availability of habitats for wildlife worldwide. However, linking species persistence to large-scale habitat changes is challenging, especially when wildlife monitoring data is lacking. In China, the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) is a species of conservation concern and is listed as...

Spring phenology of temperate ecosystems is highly sensitive to climate change, generating various impacts on many important terrestrial surface biophysical processes. Although various prognostic models relying on environmental variables of temperature and photoperiod have been developed for spring phenology, comprehensive ecosystem-scale evaluatio...

Plant canopy temperature (Tc) plays a crucial role in regulating plant growth and metabolism. Although dominant controls on Tc are observed to differ across timescales, whether this would cause differences in plant thermoregulation capability (PTC) remains unclear, raising concerns about extrapolating findings on plant thermoregulation from one tim...

Detection of flowering and quantification of flowering phenology are key to monitoring the reproduction of tropical trees and their response to global change. However, effective monitoring of flowering over various scales from individuals to forest ecosystem levels is lacking due to the relatively small sizes of flowers, diverse flowering strategie...

Aim Understanding the considerable variability and drivers of global leaf photosynthetic capacity [indicated by the maximum carboxylation rate standardized to 25°C ( V c,max25 )] is an essential step for accurate modelling of terrestrial plant photosynthesis and carbon uptake under climate change. Although current environmental conditions have ofte...

In tropical forests, leaf phenology signals leaf-on/off status and exhibits considerable variability across scales from a single tree-crown to the entire forest ecosystem. Such phenology signals importantly regulate large-scale biogeochemical cycles and regional climate. PlanetScope CubeSats data with a 3-m resolution and near-daily global coverage...

The cover image is based on the Research Article Vegetation regeneration on natural terrain landslides in Hong Kong: Direct seeding of native species as a restoration tool by Ying Ki Law et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/ldr.4492.

In temperate forests, leaf phenology is a sensitive indicator of climate change and a major regulator of seasonal carbon and water cycling. Many studies have documented large intra-site leaf phenology variability across individual trees but conventional approaches for monitoring individual tree-scale leaf phenology are often limited to a small spat...

To what degree plant ecosystems thermoregulate their canopy temperature (Tc) is critical to assess ecosystems' metabolisms and resilience with climate change, but remains controversial, with opinions from no to moderate thermoregulation capability. With global datasets of Tc, air temperature (Ta), and other environmental and biotic variables from F...

PlanetScope CubeSats data with a 3-m resolution, frequent revisits, and global coverage have provided an unprecedented opportunity to advance land surface monitoring over the recent years. Similar to other optical satellites, cloud-induced data missing in PlanetScope satellites substantially hinders its use for broad applications. However, effectiv...

Landslides are common in tropical and subtropical regions with hilly terrains and heavy rainstorms, and can cause significant economic, ecological, and social impacts. Natural forest succession is usually slow on landslide due to poor soil structure and lack of woody plant seeds, and often comes with a higher risk of repeated landslides. Active for...

Background ‘Megafire’ is an emerging concept commonly used to describe fires that are extreme in terms of size, behaviour, and/or impacts, but the term’s meaning remains ambiguous. Approach We sought to resolve ambiguity surrounding the meaning of ‘megafire’ by conducting a structured review of the use and definition of the term in several languag...

Leaf thermoregulation and consequent leaf-to-air temperature difference (ΔT) are tightly linked to plant metabolic rates and health. Current knowledge mainly focus on the regulation of environmental conditions on ΔT, while an accurate assessment of biotic regulations with field data remains lacking. Here, we used a trait-based model that integrates...

Landslides are common in tropical and subtropical regions with hilly terrains and heavy rainstorms, which cause significant economic, ecological, and social impacts. Natural forest succession is usually slow on landslide scars due to poor soil structure and the lack of seeds of woody plant seeds, and often comes with a higher risk of repeated lands...

Tropical leaf phenology—particularly its variability at the tree-crown scale—dominates the seasonality of carbon and water fluxes. However, given enormous species diversity, accurate means of monitoring leaf phenology in tropical forests is still lacking. Time series of the Green Chromatic Coordinate (GCC) metric derived from tower-based red–greenb...

Anthropogenic and natural disturbances can cause degradation of ecosystems, reducing their capacity to sustain biodiversity and provide ecosystem services. Understanding the extent of ecosystem degradation is critical for estimating risks to ecosystems, yet there are few existing methods to map degradation at the ecosystem scale and none using free...

Quantifying trends in ecosystem extent is essential to understanding the status of ecosystems. Estimates of ecosystem loss are widely used to track progress toward conservation targets, monitor deforestation, and identify ecosystems undergoing rapid change. Satellite remote sensing has become an important source of information for estimating these...

Human wellbeing is inextricably linked to the health of the environment. In the Anthropocene, new measures of progress are required to support high levels of human health and quality of life whilst ensuring a sustainable, healthy environment. The sustainable development goals (SDGs), New Urban Agenda, and Paris Agreement on Climate Change provide t...

Arctic and alpine species are expected to be particularly vulnerable to climate change as they inhabit areas of extreme climates. To understand how such species may respond, we compared two groups of bumblebees that specialise in arctic (Alpinobombus) and alpine (Mendacibombus) biomes. These bumblebee species are all extreme cold specialists with s...

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems and Red List of Threatened Species are global standards for assessing risks of ecosystem collapse and species extinction. However, misconceptions of the Red List assessment process, along with its technically demanding nature, can result in the misapplication of th...

Climate change poses a growing risk to global biodiversity. To prioritize conservation efforts, identification of the species and ecosystems most at risk from further changes in climatic conditions is critically needed. Although frameworks are available to assess species vulnerability to climate change, we still lack an easily implementable, ecosys...

A toolbox created by members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems Committee for Scientific Standards. Primarily, it is a set of tools suitable for calculating the metrics required for making assessments of species and ecosystems against the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and the IUCN Red List of E...