He Yin

Kent State University | KSU · Department of Geography

Grassland ecosystems cover up to 40% of the global land area and provide many ecosystem services directly supporting the livelihoods of over 1 billion people. Monitoring long-term changes in grasslands is crucial for food security, biodiversity conservation, achieving Land Degradation Neutrality goals, and modeling the global carbon budget. Althoug...

Despite worldwide prevalence, post-agricultural landscapes remain one of the least constrained human-induced land carbon sinks. To appraise their role in rebuilding the planet’s natural carbon stocks through ecosystem restoration, we need to better understand their spatial and temporal legacies.

Attributing the extent of changes in vegetation cover which are the result of human actions or of climate vari-ability is challenging. The Negev Desert, bordered by two countries and the Palestinian Authority and crossing three climate zones, provides a natural laboratory for unveiling the impact of land practices on natural vege-tation. Desert veg...

Wars are frequent and can affect land use substantially, but the effects of wars can vary greatly depending on their characteristics, such as intensity or duration. Furthermore, the spatial scale of the effects can differ. The effects of wars may be localized and thus close to conflict locations if direct mechanisms matter most (e.g., abandonment b...

The mapping of sugarcane plantations and their changes is relevant to the economy and the environment, notably due to sugarcane’s interface in the biofuel industry through ethanol. The necessary mapping of sugarcane crop changes is especially challenging when plantation occurs under smallholders’ land ownership structures used for heterogeneous cro...

Hundreds of millions of hectares of cropland have been abandoned globally since 1950 due to demographic, economic, and environmental changes. This abandonment has been seen as an important opportunity for carbon sequestration and habitat restoration; yet those benefits depend on the persistence of abandonment, which is poorly known. Here, we track...

In mountainous environments, topography strongly affects the reflectance due to illumination effects and cast shadows, which introduce errors in land cover classifications. However, topographic correction is not routinely implemented in standard data pre-processing chains (e.g., Landsat Analysis Ready Data), and there is a lack of consensus whether...

Forest biodiversity conservation and species distribution modeling greatly benefit from broad-scale forest maps depicting tree species or forest types rather than just presence and absence of forest, or coarse classifications. Ideally, such maps would stem from satellite image classification based on abundant field data for both model training and...

Grasslands are important for global biodiversity, food security, and climate change analyses, which makes mapping and monitoring of vegetation changes in grasslands necessary to better understand, sustainably manage, and protect these ecosystems. However, grassland vegetation monitoring at spatial and temporal resolution relevant to land management...

Land use maps describe the spatial distribution of natural resources, cultural landscapes, and human settlements, serving as an important planning tool for decision makers. In the Sahel area, such information is valuable for risk management and mitigation in challenging sectors like food security, flood control, and urban planning. Due to its unifo...

Reliable crop type maps are vital for agricultural monitoring, ensuring food security, and environmental sustainability assessments. Coarse-resolution imagery such as MODIS are widely used for crop type mapping due to their short revisit cycles, which is advantageous for detecting the seasonal dynamics of different crop types. However, the inherent...

Mapping forest resources is essential for biodiversity conservation, and remote sensing is the most efficient way to do so over large areas. Yet mapping forest types is still a challenge, when different types have similar spectral signatures, and when ground reference data is lacking. Remotely-sensed images can capture differences in the phenology...

Mountainous regions are changing rapidly across the world due to both land-use change and climate change. Given the importance of mountainous regions for ecosystem services and endemic biodiversity, monitoring these changes is essential. Satellite data provide a great resource to map land-cover change in mountainous regions, however mapping is espe...

Accurate information on crop distribution and its changes is important for food security and environmental management. Although time series analysis is a widely-used and useful tool to characterize the seasonal dynamics of crops, the traditional image stacking approach misses important phenological events. This condition makes it difficult to ident...

Urbanization causes the simplification of natural habitats, resulting in animal communities dominated by exotic species with few top predators. In recent years, however, many predators such as hawks, and in the US coyotes and cougars, have become increasingly common in urban environments. Hawks in the Accipiter genus, especially, are recovering fro...

The frequency of extreme weather events in China has been increasing due to global warming. The variety of soil types makes for varying levels of water retention capacity across Southwest China. However, spatially detailed information about soil water retention capacity is often difficult to obtain on a large scale. It has been hypothesized that ag...

Agricultural land abandonment is a common land-use change, making the accurate mapping of both location and timing when agricultural land abandonment occurred important to understand its environmental and social outcomes. However, it is challenging to distinguish agricultural abandonment from transitional classes such as fallow land at high spatial...

China has been undergoing unprecedented urbanization since the 1978 economic reform, with the present growth rate of 20 million people per year. This rapid and perennial progress has been raising concerns about environmental sustainability, due to a severe nationwide deterioration of China's environment and ecosystems in the context of ceaselessly...

During the past decades, overuse of land resources has increasingly contributed to environmental crises in China. To mitigate wide-spread land degradation, actions have been taken to maintain and restore ecologically valuable landscapes such as natural forests. However, the effects of the various vegetation protection policies that have been implem...

Despite rapid advances and large-scale initiatives in forest mapping, reliable cross-border information about the status of forest resources in Central Asian countries is lacking. We produced consistent Central Asia forest cover (CAFC) maps based on a cost-efficient approach using multi-resolution satellite imagery from Landsat and MODIS during 200...

China faces a complicated puzzle in balancing the country’s trade-offs among water and energy security, economic competitiveness, and environmental sustainability. It is therefore of prime importance to comprehend China’s water and energy security under the effect of its economic structural changes. Analyses of this issue still remain few and far b...

The objectives of this chapter were to discuss the development of conceptual vulnerability, and construct an integrated drought vulnerability assessment profile. A case study was used to apply and test the model for Inner Mongolia, China, at the county level, and this highlighted the relative impact of vulnerability components on the computed vulne...

Mapping land use and land cover change (LULCC) over large areas at regular time intervals is a key requisite to improve our understanding of dynamic land systems. In this study, we developed and tested an automated approach for mapping land use and land cover changes at annual time intervals using data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrora...

Investigating the temporal changes in crop phenology is essential for understanding crop response and adaption to climate change. Using observed climatic and maize phenological data from 53 agricultural meteorological stations in Northeast China between 1990 and 2012, this study analyzed the spatiotemporal changes in maize phenology, temperatures a...

Detailed information from global remote sensing has greatly advanced our understanding of Earth as a system in general and of agricultural processes in particular. Vegetation monitoring with global remote sensing systems over long time periods is critical to gain a better understanding of processes related to agricultural change over long time peri...

In this paper, we proposed a framework for evaluating the performance of ecosystem strategies prepared for enhancing vulnerability reduction in the face of hazards due to climate change. The framework highlights the positive effects of human activities in the coupled human and natural system (CHANS) by introducing adaptive capacity as an evaluation...

Desertification is widely recognized as one of the most serious global environmental threats occurring in ecological fragile areas. To assess desertification at a regional scale is of practical significance in understanding environmental change and strengthening ecosystem management. We critically reviewed the development of desertification concept...

Ecological Function Regionalization (EFR) is viewed as one of the most important strategies to support ecosystem management and sustainable development worldwide. EFR is a systematic method for classifying and mapping ecological unit at the regional scale, based on integrating the information of the nature and distribution of ecosystems, as well as...

Based on the data of 88 meteorological observation stations distributed in nine provinces and autonomous regions in Huanghe River (Yellow River) basin of China, time series of annual precipitation and temperature, the frequency and quantity of extreme precipitation per year were analyzed to assess the correlation of precipitation to temperature inc...

Ecological risk assessment is a key measure of ecological environment management. To assess the ecological risk at regional scale is of practical significance in strengthening ecosystem management and regional ecological safety. This paper reviewed the concept, definition, main contents, and development process of regional ecological risk assessmen...

As a local environmental issue with global importance, land use/land cover change (LUCC) has always been one of the key issues in geography and environmental studies with the expansion of regional case studies. While most of LUCC studies in China have focused on urban land use change, meanwhile, compared with the rapid change of urban land use in t...