Chuanyu Gao

Chinese Academy of Sciences | CAS · Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology

The northeastern region of China, at the limit of the summer monsoon, is characterized by the presence of mountains that influenced by the Asian summer monsoon on one side and the westerlies on the other; however, few studies have compared the environmental characteristics on the two sides of these mountains. In this study, two peatland cores from...

Peatlands are a major source of atmospheric CH4. The availability of terminal electron acceptors largely affects the ratio of CO2 to CH4 formation under water-logged anoxic conditions in these systems. Although the importance of peat organic matter as an electron acceptor is increasingly recognized, the actual budgets of electron accepting capaciti...

Peatland carbon pools store one-third of global soil carbon, but are increasingly threatened by wildfires, particularly high intensity wildfires, as a consequence of climate warming. However, with only a limited understanding of fire history reconstruction available, the long-term impacts of fire intensity on the stability of the peatland carbon po...

Pyrogenic carbon (PyC), generated by fire, acts as a stable carbon deposit in natural ecosystems and is widely used to reconstruct fire history. Fuel type and burning temperature are the two major factors that influence PyC properties and exert variable effects on soil carbon pools, especially for peatlands. However, whether analysis of PyC can ide...

Peatlands store nearly 30% of global soil carbon, and they are widely distributed in mid-to high latitude regions that are sensitive to climate change and recently subject to more frequent fires. Fire not only causes direct effects on the growth of plant communities but also results in significant effects on organic matter (OM) sources and the stab...

Presently, as human activity and climate warming gradually increase, straw burning leads to more accidental burning in neighbouring wetlands, which threatens wetland carbon stores. Plants are important carbon fixers in wetlands, converting carbon dioxide to biomass through photosynthesis and releasing carbon into the soil as plants die off. Nitroge...

Fire is an important disturbance of wetland P reservoirs by changing the distribution of P in soils and plants. However, the effects of various fire regimes on the distribution of P in wetlands are not known. In a three-year burn experiment, we evaluated the effects of three burn factors on the P distribution of plants (stem, leaf, and litter) and...

Wetlands, including peatlands, marshes, swamps, and coastal wetlands, contain more than 30% of terrestrial soil carbon on only 8% of the Earth’s land surface (Mitsch and Gosselink, 2007). Due to their specific biodiversity and ecosystem function, and linking terrestrial and aquatic systems, wetlands are key players in the most important ecosystem s...

As global warming becomes more pronounced, climate change and human activities are leading to frequent peat fire incidents. Fire plays an important role in the environmental distribution of trace metals in peat soils. In the current study, we collected peat soils from six peatlands of the Great Khingan Mountains in Northeast China, where wildfires...

Editorial on the Research Topic Disturbance, resilience and restoration of wetlands

Introduction The peat carbon pool stores 30% of the total global soil carbon accounting for 3–4% of the global land surface. The stability of the peatland carbon pool is a key factor affecting global carbon cycling that is seriously disturbed by climate change and regional human activities. However, the impact of these factors on carbon pool stabil...

The organic matter (OM) properties of peat soils play an important role in maintaining the stability of the peatland carbon pool and carbon cycling under environmental disturbances. The environmental disturbances not only directly affect the peatland carbon pool, but also cause changing of the vegetation community, which potentially has direct effe...

Purpose The increase in human activities and climate change has caused more pyrogenic carbon (PyC), which is produced by fossil fuels or incomplete biomass consumption, to accumulate in natural ecosystems in the past hundred years and has caused serious effects on soil carbon pools. Although the peatland soil carbon pool represents 25–30% of the te...

In organic soils, the availability of terminal electron acceptors (TEAs) determines the ratio of CO2 to CH4 formation under anoxic conditions. While the importance of electron accepting capacities (EACs) of organic matter is increasingly acknowledged, redox properties of organic matter have only been investigated in a limited set of peat and refere...

Relationships between diatom assemblages and environmental variables in peatlands of the northern Greater Khingan Mountains are helpful for understanding the indicative significance of diatoms to environment changes, and potentially provide a reference for environmental monitoring and paleoenvironment reconstruction in the edge of monsoon region. I...

Over half of the Earth's wetlands have been reclaimed for agriculture, leading to significant soil P destabilization and leaching risks. To evaluate the effects of agricultural land use on soil P stability, we used sequential P extraction to investigate the long-term effects of wetland cultivation for rice and soybean on soil P fractions, including...

Wildfires play a critical role in regulating soil carbon (C) budgets in peatland ecosystems, and their frequency and intensity are increasing owing to climate change and human activities. Wildfires not only emit CO2 during the combustion process but also produce pyrogenic carbon (PyC), which accumulates in the soil C pool and influences soil C deco...

Relationships between diatoms assemblages and environmental variables in peatlands of the northern Greater Khingan Mountains is helpful for understanding the indicative significance of diatoms to environment changes, and potentially provides a reference for environmental monitoring and paleoenvironment reconstruction in the edge of monsoon region....

Wetlands store >30% of the global soil carbon pool, which is important for global carbon cycling. However, with global warming and the increase in regional human activities, an increasing number of wetlands are being threatened by fires, which have serious effects on carbon cycling in wetlands. Although plant litter decomposition is one of the key...

Ecosystem resilience to pressures expanding and contracting within the adaptive cycle as slow variables change. However, little is known about their role in defining reference conditions for wetland restoration. Here, we applied paleoecological data of two wetlands that have been degraded (Honghe, riparian peatland) and disappeared (Shenjiadian, va...

Methane production in peatlands is controlled by the availability of electron acceptors for microbial respiration, including peat dissolved (DOM) and particulate organic matter (POM). Despite the much larger mass of POM in peat, knowledge on the ranges of its electron transfer capacities (electron accepting capacity – EAC, and electron donating cap...

The response of carbon pools in peatlands during the last millennium is important for global carbon cycling and is a potential indicator for paleoenvironmental research. Herein, we compared the stability and accumulation of carbon pools between the Hongtu peatland (HT, east site) and the Jintao peatland (JT, west site) in the northern Great Khingan...

A decade-resolution study of peat cores from four different locations around Yuanchi Lake, a small shallow maar lake in the Changbai Mountains of northeastern China, has established that peat deposition around this lake amplified at ca. 1800 CE with accumulation rates that differ among the four closely spaced sites. Comparisons of the n-alkane dist...

Phosphorus was one of the nutrient limitations to vegetations in wetland ecosystem. In peatland, organic phosphorus is accumulated as vegetation residues in anaerobic conditions, affecting the contents of phosphorus pools for long time. It is unclear that different vegetations affect the contents of phosphorus and whether successions of vegetations...

Fire is an important disturbance in many wetlands, which are key carbon reservoirs at both regional and global scales. However, the effects of fire on wetland vegetation biomass and plant carbon dynamics are poorly understood. We carried out a burn experiment in a Calamagrostis angustifolia wetland in Sanjiang Plain (Northeast China), which is wide...

Relationships between modern pollen, climate and human activities are important for improving the explanation of fossil records. To better understand anthropogenic and climatic impact on peatland vegetation and environment, we assessed the impact of human influence index (HII) on modern pollen assemblages from 61 surface soil samples (different lan...

The cover image is based on the Focus Article Healthy waterways and ecologically sustainable cities in Beijing‐Tianjin‐Hebei urban agglomeration (northern China): Challenges and future directions by Giri Kattel et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1500. Abstract The cover image is based on the Focus Article Healthy waterways and ecologically susta...

The cities across the northern dry region of China are exposed to multiple sustainability challenges. Beijing‐Hebei‐Tianjin (BTH) urban agglomeration, for example, experiences severe water shortages due to rapidly expanding urban populations, industrial use, and irrigation‐intensive agriculture. Climate change has further threatened water resources...

A high‐resolution study of bulk properties in a peat sequence from the Xinjiang Altai Mountains of northwestern China has allowed reconstruction of local variations in peat properties and peat C and N accumulation rates (CAR and NAR) during the Holocene. Analyses of peat bulk density, loss on ignition, and concentrations of total organic carbon (TO...

To investigate the connection of phosphorus (P) forms with peatland succession and history of fire in Tuqiang peatland, a 57 cm peat core was sampled with high-resolution (1-cm intervals) in the north of the Great Khingan mountain (Northeast China). AMS 14 C dating techniques combined with sequential chemical extraction was used to determine and ca...

The relationships among modern pollen, vegetation, climate and human activities can help improving the reliability of reconstruction of past vegetation, regional climate and human activities based on fossil pollen records. We used a dataset of 114 surface soil pollen samples from natural vegetation (wetlands, forests and grasslands) and human-induc...

Peatlands store one-third of the total global soil carbon (C.) despite covering only 3–4% of the global land surface. Most peatlands are distributed in mid-high latitude regions and are even in permafrost regions, are sensitive to climate change and are disturbed by wildfire. Although several studies have focused on the impact of historical climate...

High-latitude region is sensitive to global climate change, and pollen record in sediments could reflect vegetation variation which responded to climate change. The Great Hinggan Mountains are main distribution areas of peatlands in high-latitude region in China and located at East Asian summer monsoonal margin, however, the variation of vegetation...

Here we present results from a total of 10 peatland cores dated by ²¹⁰Pb analysis in the Greater Khingan Range and Sanjiang Plain, Northeast China to determine their carbon accumulation rates and evaluate possible climate connections during the last 100 years. The carbon accumulation rate and temperature in the Greater Khingan Range were lower than...

Placer gold mining is important anthropogenic sources of dust and metals that can strongly influence the environmental quality of the surrounding ecosystem. However, scarce studies have focused on evaluating the influence of placer gold mining on historical metal deposition in the surrounding ecosystem in the northern Great Hinggan Mountains, which...

The western Songnen Plain, which is located in a semi-arid region, is one of the most important cultivated regions in China, and it is subject to constant threats from sandy desertification due to wind erosion. Wetland patches between the desert and cultivated regions in the western Songnen Plain capture dust from desert regions and are influenced...

Peatlands are ideal archives that are widely used to reconstruct historical Hg accumulation around the world. However, decomposition of peat soils leads to Hg enrichment or depletion in peat profiles. To evaluate the impact of peat decomposition on historical Hg accumulation records, a 7800-year peat sequence from the Shenjiadian peatland (SJD-2, S...

The nutritional status of lake ecosystem is widely used to assess the resilience and early-warning signals under the disturbance, and the tipping point in nutritional status is considered as the early-warning signal in the lake ecosystem. For wetland ecosystem, nutrients and pollution-related elements could be retained and may not destroy the syste...

Purpose Black carbon (BC) refers to solid charred residues produced by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass. The Great Hinggan Mountains are located on the margin of the East Asian monsoon region, and BC from fossil fuel sources could be deposited in this region through transport by westerlies and the monsoon. The overall objective...

Diatom-inferred changes in past water levels and the evolution of peatlands during the Holocene period are investigated in the Honghe National Natural Reserve (HNNR), which is located on the Sanjiang Plain of Northeast China. This investigation began with analyses of fossil diatoms and the corresponding water environments from the surface sediments...

The Earth can be described as having entered a new human-dominated geological epoch that is known as the “Anthropocene”, and determining the timing of the start of the Anthropocene has become important. Here, we combined sedimentological parameters (sedimentation rate and mean grain size), geochemical indicators (heavy metal enrichment factors, bla...

The information of species' response (optimum or critical limits along environmental gradients) is a key to understanding ecological questions and to design management plans. A large number of plots (762) from 70 transects of 13 wetland sites in Northeast China were sampled along flooding gradient from marsh to wet meadow. Species response (abundan...

Black carbon is produced by incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass. The production of black carbon over the last several centuries has been primarily influenced by human activities. Human exploitation of forest resources, together with increases in regional fire frequency and intensity, can increase regional black carbon emissions and le...

The Songhua River is the largest river in northeastern China; the river's water quality is one of the most important factors that influence regional ecological health and food safety in northeastern China and even the downstream of the Heilong River in Russia. In recent years, the Chinese government implemented several water resource protection pol...

Anthropocene has been proposed as a new geological epoch, in which human activities have modified or even destroyed the nature ecosystem. Ecosystem recovery needs nature ecosystem without anthropogenic influence as the baseline condition. Dating the beginning period of regional intensive human activities is important for identifying the starting ti...

Lipid biomarkers extracted from a sediment-peat sequence from the Sanjiang Plain were analyzed to assess the change in regional vegetation and climate during the last 8 ky. The combination of n-alkane and n-alkanoic acid distributions and published pollen and plant macrofossil records for the lake sediments underlying the peat reveal that the regio...

Black carbon (BC), produced by incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, mainly influenced by human activities in recent hundreds years. BC deposition fluxes in sedimentary archives (e.g. wetland, lake sediments) is an ideal proxy to show historical fire frequency and regional BC emission. Slash-and-burn of pastures and forests during recl...

Black carbon (BC) is produced by incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, and it is strongly influenced by human activities in recent hundreds years. Due to its refractory nature, BC is stored in sedimentary archives (e.g. wetland, lake sediments) and provides an ideal proxy to show historical fire frequency and regional BC emission. Incr...

To understand carbon storage in water logged, anaerobic peatlands, factors controlling mineralization have been studied for decades. Temperature, substrate quality, water table position and the availability of electron acceptors for oxidation of organic carbon have been identified as major factors. However, many studies reported an excess carbon di...

Reconstructing historical hydrologic and vegetation conditions can provide useful insights into the mechanisms underlying peatland development and can be used to construct baselines for peatland restoration. In this study, we present numerous physical and biological indices for a 4000-year core from the Honghe National Natural Reserve (HE), a dish-...

Flooding regime changes resulting from natural and human activity have been projected to affect wetland plant community structures and functions. It is therefore important to conduct investigations across a range of flooding gradients to assess the impact of flooding depth on wetland vegetation. We conducted this study to identify the pattern of pl...

Dating the start of intensive anthropogenic influence on ecosystems is important for identifying the conditions necessary for ecosystem recovery. However, few studies have focused on determining when anthropogenic influences on wetland began through sedimentary archives. To fill this critical gap in our knowledge, combustion sources and emission in...

Black carbon (BC), an important component of organic carbon (OC) produced from incomplete combustion of carbon compounds, is widespread and affects the global carbon storage. The objectives of this study were to analyze the BC contents and fluxes in the last 150 years to determine the causes of differences in the three profiles of the Songnen Plain...

Black carbon (BC) is one of the major drivers of climate change and a useful indicator of environmental pollution from industrialization, and thus it is essential to reconstruct the historical trend in BC flux to better understand its impact. The Yancheng coastal wetland reserve in Jiangsu province is an area sensitive to global sea level change an...

Peatlands contain around one third of the global soil carbon (C) and play an important role in the C cycle. In particular, the response of the productivity-decay balance to climate variability is critical for understanding both the past and future global C cycle. Most studies of peatland C dynamics have been carried out on boreal and subarctic peat...

The 150-year historical changes in concentrations of pollution elements (Pb, Cu and Zn) in sediment profiles from two riparian freshwater wetlands along the Wusuli River (boundary river between China and Russia) were studied, and the ecological risk of heavy metals and their effects on four riparian wetlands during the urban development from Khanka...

n-Alkanes from the Great Hinggan Mountain ombrotrophic peat bog in northeast China record changes in vegetation and climate of the East Asian monsoon marginal region over the past 800 yr. At the end of the Medieval Warm period, shrubs and/or sedges were the predominant plants, and the climate was warm and dry. The subsequent appearance of large amo...