Hong S He

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Verified

Hong verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Missouri

Alpine treelines ecotones are critical ecological transition zones and are highly sensitive to global warming. However, the impact of climate on the distribution of treeline trees is not yet fully understood as this distribution may also be affected by other factors. Here, we used high‐resolution satellite images with climatic and topographic varia...

Using Planetscope imagery, we trained a random forest model to detect Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) throughout a diverse urban landscape in Columbia, Missouri. The random forest model had a classification accuracy of 89.78%, a recall score of 0.693, and an F1 score of 0.819. The key hyperparameters for model tuning were the cutoff and class–weigh...

In this study, we present a methodology for predicting timber board foot volume using a forest landscape model, incorporating allometric equations and forest inventory data. The research focuses on the Ozark Plateau, a 48,000-square-mile region characterized by productive soils and varied precipitation. To simulate timber volume, we used the LANDIS...

Understanding the complex interplay of biotic and abiotic factors influencing the white oak mortality rate is crucial for developing effective forest management strategies in the eastern United States. This study examines the influence of biotic and abiotic factors on WOM rates, utilizing a Classification and Regression Tree model to evaluate and r...

Understanding functional trait differences between treeline and non-treeline species is key to exploring their adaptive strategies under environmental stress and predicting subalpine forest dynamics. On Changbai Mountain, Betula ermanii dominates over 90 % of the treeline zone, while Picea jezoensis accounts for over 70 % of the lower elevation zon...

The complex life cycle traits of amphibians make them especially sensitive to environmental change, and their ongoing conservation requires the maintenance of suitable habitat that accounts for such life cycle characteristics which may impacted by local environmental dynamics arising from climate change and human disturbance. Many existing studies...

White oak mortality is a significant concern in forest ecosystems due to its impact on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Understanding the factors influencing white oak mortality is crucial for effective forest management and conservation efforts. In this study, we aimed to investigate the spatial pattern of WOM rates across the eastern US and...

White oak mortality is a significant concern in forest ecosystems due to its impact on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Understanding the factors influencing white oak mortality is crucial for effective forest management and conservation efforts. In this study, we aimed to investigate the spatial pattern of white oak mortality rates at differe...

Woody plant encroachment (WPE), a global phenomenon documented across various biomes and continents, has the potential to significantly impact ecosystem carbon and water cycling. However, the impacts of WPE on carbon and water cycling in wetland ecosystems of middle and high latitudes are still lacking. In this study, the interannual and seasonal i...

Global climate change has markedly influenced the structure and distribution of mid-high-latitude forests. In the forest region of Northeast China, the magnitude of climate warming surpasses the global average, which presents immense challenges to the survival and habitat sustainability of dominant tree species. We predicted the potential changes i...

Given the reality of climate-driven migration, the net effectiveness of existing spatially fixed protected areas (PAs) to biodiversity conservation is expected to decline, while the potential of non-PA habitats (non-PAs, i.e., natural, altered, or artificial ecosystems that are not formally designated as PAs) for biodiversity conservation is gainin...

The identification of groundwater contamination sources (IGCSs) is an important requirement for the remediation and treatment of groundwater contamination. The data assimilation methods such as ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) and ensemble smoother (ES) have been applied to IGCSs in recent years and obtained good identification results. The unscented...

The effects of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations (Ca) with climate warming on intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE) and radial growth in boreal forests are still poorly understood. We measured tree-ring cellulose δ13C, δ18O, and tree-ring width in Larix dahurica (larch) and Betula platyphylla (white birch), and analyzed their relationships with...

Atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD) increases with climate warming and may limit plant growth. However, gross primary production (GPP) responses to VPD remain a mystery, offering a significant source of uncertainty in the estimation of global terrestrial ecosystems carbon dynamics. In this study, in-situ measurements, satellite-derived data, a...

Changes in extreme precipitation in Northeast China (NEC), a climate-sensitive region, remain unclear with respect to future warming due to regionally unique geographic factors. This study examines how regional extreme precipitation may adapt to future climate change. Using statistical downscaling and the CMIP6 multi-model ensemble, we investigate...

Preserving the abundance and stocking of oaks (Quercus spp.) has become increasingly challenging in temperate hardwood forests of the eastern US in recent decades due to a remarkable shift in dominance to mesophytic species (e.g., red maple Acer rubrum). Studies have shown that efforts to sustain oaks while restraining maples yield limited success....

Alpine treeline ecotones are highly sensitive to climate warming. The low temperature-determined alpine treeline is expected to shift upwards in response to global warming. However, little is known about how temperature interacts with other important factors to influence the distribution range of tree species within and beyond the alpine treeline e...

Forest phenology is undergoing significant changes as a consequence of climate warming, something which is further complicated by snow cover phenology. While previous research has shown tight links between climate factors, snow cover and forest phenology changes, the relative importance of climate and snow cover on forest phenology has not yet been...

Human activities in a transborder watershed are complex under the influence of domestic policies, international relations, and global events. Understanding the forces driving human activity change is important for the development of transborder watershed. In this study, we used global historical land cover data, the hemeroby index model, and synthe...

Large explosive volcanic eruptions can cover wide areas of land with tephra, profoundly disturbing ecological and societal systems. However, while consequences of tephra fallout and flow deposits have been well studied on annual to decadal timescale, little is known about centennial and longer-term changes in vegetation composition. Here, we recons...

Exploring spring phenology dynamics driven by climate change is crucial for investigating land–climate feedback. However, a thorough assessment of the influence of climatic drivers on spring phenology remains lacking. Here, we investigated spatiotemporal variations at the start of the growing season (SOS) in the Greater Khingan Mountains, Northeast...

Active management for promoting oaks (Quercus spp.) and restraining maples (Acer spp.) is mostly conducted in public forests (e.g., national forests [NF] and state forests [SF]) because of oaks' ecological and economic importance. Studies have shown that current management efforts have limited success, meanwhile, oak-dominant forests continue to sh...

BACKGROUND Drought affects the characteristics of water use during crop production and so quantitatively evaluating the impacts is important. However, it remains unclear how crop water use responds to drought. To address this gap, water footprint (WF) and standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) were calculated by remote sensing a...

White oak mortality is a significant concern in forest ecosystems due to its impact on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Understanding the factors influencing white oak mortality, particularly the soil properties, is crucial for effective forest management and conservation efforts. In this study, we aimed to investigate the spatial pattern of w...

White oak mortality is a significant concern in forest ecosystems due to its impact on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Understanding the factors influencing white oak mortality, particularly the soil properties, is crucial for effective forest management and conservation efforts. In this study, we aimed to investigate the spatial pattern of w...

Mid and high latitude wetlands are becoming fragmented and losing ecosystem functions at a much faster rate than many other ecosystems. This is due in part to increasing human activities and climate change. In this study, we analyzed wetland distribution and spatial pattern changes for the Heilongjiang River Basin over the past 100 yr. We identifie...

High-resolution temperature reconstructions in the previous millennium are limited in Northeast Asia, but they are important for assessing regional climate dynamics. Here, we present, for the first time, a 202-year reliable reconstruction of April temperature changes before the millennium volcanic eruption in 946 CE using tree rings of carbonized l...

Spatiotemporal changes in wet and dry spells had significantly contributed to climate‐related natural hazards in East Asia, especially in river basins undergoing warming. However, few studies have systematically analysed these changes for river basins at different latitudes. Herein, we investigated the observed and projected variations in wet and d...

The poor natural regeneration of Pinus koraiensis is a key limitation for restoring the primary mixed Pinus koraiensis forests. Seed harvesting and climate change are the important factors that influence the natural regeneration of Pinus koraiensis; however, it is hard to illustrate how, in synergy, they affect its regeneration at the landscape sca...

Global environmental changes continuously result in plant migration from lower elevations or latitudes into alpine or arctic tundra ecosystems. In response to global environmental changes, the alpine shrubby tundra on the Changbai Mountain in northeastern China has been invaded by a low-elevation herb species Deyeuxia angustifolia over the past sev...

Understanding the degree to which weather factors influence fire occurrence is crucial for managing wildfires because China's recent rigorous fire prevention measures have made fire occurrence drivers distinct from those in other nations. This study first examined the features of mainland China wildfires in order to provide an explanation. We used...

Peatlands are some of the largest carbon reservoirs in terrestrial ecosystems and play a key role in the global carbon cycle. Understanding peatland development, carbon accumulation processes, and the peatland response to varying forcing factors over different temporal and spatial scales helps reveal the underlying processes and general patterns of...

Climate change and forest management practices influence forest productivity and carbon budgets, and understanding their interactions is necessary to develop accurate predictions of carbon dynamics as many countries in the world strive towards carbon neutrality. Here, we developed a model-coupling framework to simulate the carbon dynamics of boreal...

Adequate seed provenance is an important guarantee for the restoration of the mixed Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis) and broadleaf forest (MKPBF). However, the commercial harvest exclusion in natural forests has led to a sharp decline in economic income from timber. Given the economic value of Korean pine seeds, predatory seed harvesting (PSH) has be...

As the Earth’s population continuously increase with the passage of time, the demand for agricultural raw material for human need increases. It is critical to maintaining updated and accurate information about the dynamics and properties of the world agricultural systems. As cash crop, the updated information of the spatial distribution of cotton f...

Human activities have altered disturbance patterns in many parts of world, but there is no quantitative information on patterns and trends of forest disturbance regimes in China. We applied a spectral-temporal segmentation approach over all available Landsat data to map individual disturbance patches and characterize the patterns and trends in dist...

The simulation optimization method was used to the identification of light nonaqueous phase liquid (LNAPL) groundwater contamination source (GCS) with the help of a hypothetical case in this study. When applying the simulation optimization method to identify GCS, it was a common technical means to establish surrogate model for the simulation model...

The simulation optimization (S/O) method is widely used in the identification of groundwater contamination sources (IGCSs). However, in most cases, the IGCSs has the characteristics of many variables to be identified and a high degree of nonlinearity. When the grey wolf optimization algorithm (GWO) is used to solve the optimization model for this k...

Climate change has increased the severity, frequency, and impact of fire disturbance on boreal forests worldwide. Unusual fire events can trigger a shift from needle-leaf dominated forests to broad-leaf dominated forests, altering the original succession trajectory. Thus, it is necessary to identify how altered fire regimes affect boreal forest res...

Mounting evidence suggests that climate change will cause shifts of tree species range and abundance (biomass). Abundance changes under climate change are likely to occur prior to a detectable range shift. Disturbances are expected to directly affect tree species abundance and composition, and could profoundly influence tree species spatial distrib...

High-resolution temperature reconstructions in the prior millennium are limited in northeast Asia, but important for assessing regional climate dynamics. Here, we present, for the first time, a reconstruction of April temperature for ~300 years before the Millennium volcanic eruption in 946 AD, using tree rings of carbonized logs buried in the teph...

Key message We propose a coupled framework to combine the strengths of the Weibull function in modeling diameter distributions and the ability of the k -nearest neighbor ( k NN) method to impute spatially continuous forest stand attributes for the prediction of wall-to-wall tree lists (lists of stems per hectare by species and diameter at breast he...

In most instances, the number, location and release intensity of groundwater contamination sources (GCSs) are all unknown. The 0-1 mixed integer nonlinear programming optimization model (0-1 MINPOM) used previously could only identify the location and release intensity for GCSs. Thus a 0-1 MINPOM was improved and applied to simultaneously identify...

Precipitation extremes occurring on consecutive days may be of crucial importance for the formation of extensive and long‐lasting flooding. Changes in such consecutive extreme precipitation (CEP) events between different regions (i.e., dry and wet regions) still remain unclear in China, which may result in different impacts on human livelihoods and...

Forest landscapes pattern and development are affected by environment and disturbance. Disentangling their effects is important to understanding current landscape and predicting future changes. Such studies are limited by short-term observation and sparse disturbance-history data. Spatially-explicit forest landscape modeling represents a solution t...

The recording and simulation data of forest landscapes are massive, high-dimensional, and abstract, requiring intuitive representation. 3-D visualization is an efficient tool to comprehend possible landscape changes generated by real-world or forest landscape models. Based on current advantages of game engines (realism and convenience), we develope...

The location and release history of groundwater contaminant sources (GCSs) are usually unknown after groundwater contamination is detected, thereby greatly hindering the design of contamination remediation schemes and contamination risk assessments. Many previous studies have used prior information such as the observed contaminant concentrations (O...

Identification of groundwater contaminant sources (GCSs) relies on actual observed data, and the observed data directly affects the accuracy of the identification results. However, the observed data inevitably contains noise due to accidental and systematic errors, and the identification results of GCSs based on the observed data containing noise a...

The red wolf Canis rufus is endemic to the southeastern United States and has been reduced to a single population occupying the Albemarle Peninsula in coastal North Carolina. To ensure species persistence and to meet conservation goals as outlined in the Red Wolf Recovery Plan (USFWS 1990, 2007, 2018a), it is important to conduct habitat suitabilit...

Current increases in not only the intensity and frequency but also the duration of drought events could affect the growth, physiology, and mortality of trees. We experimentally studied the effects of drought duration in combination with fertilization on leaf water potential, gas exchange, growth, tissue levels of non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs)...

Climate and environmental changes have caused changes in alpine tundra worldwide in recent decades. However, the roles of snow cover on tundra vegetation change remain less studied. There were obvious changes of alpine tundra vegetation, such as herbaceous encroachment and shrub expansion reported in Changbai Mountains in recent decades. This study...

Biodiversity‐ecosystem function relationships have been widely studied in the field of microorganisms in recent years. The research findings revealed that microorganisms positively influence multiple ecosystem functions in diverse ecosystem types. However, the previous studies have neglected the fact that biodiversity at higher trophic levels is al...

Carbon (C) allocation plays a crucial role for survival and growth of the alpine treeline trees, which, however, is still poorly understood. Using in situ 13CO2 labeling, we investigated the leaf photosynthesis and the allocation of 13C labeled photoassimilates in various tissues (leaves, twigs and fine roots) in treeline trees and low-elevation tr...

Climate change could alter species composition, with feedback on fire disturbances by modifying fuel types and loads. However, the existing fire predictions were mainly based on climate-fire linkages that might overestimate the probability and size of fire disturbances due to simplifying or omitting vegetation feedback. We applied a model-coupling...

Context Study of interplay of disturbance and forest succession is key to understand forest landscape dynamics, especially under changing climate and disturbance regimes. However, most such studies are from small spatial and temporal scales, and thus may be limited to generalize at large scales. Objectives We investigate how typhoons affected fore...

Remnant trees have great ecological importance in post-disturbance forest landscape recovery which is strongly affected by their spatial configuration. Location and abundance, the two key attributes of spatial configuration, often act jointly, but their relative roles have rarely been investigated. Here, we spatially reconstructed a 300-year time s...

Optimization models used to identify groundwater contamination sources (GCSs) often have many variables to determine and a high degree of nonlinearity. When the grey wolf optimization algorithm (GWO) is used to solve this kind of optimization model, due to the relatively weak local search ability, it has the disadvantage of premature convergence. T...

Rain-fed crops are a major crop type, and their water use is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Studying the water requirement characteristics of rain-fed crops in different growth stages and associated climatic driving factors is of great significance for sustainable crop production. The water footprint (WF) of crops can comprehensively refle...

Climate change is expected to increase fire activity, which has the potential to accelerate climate-induced shifts in species composition and distribution in the boreal-temperate ecotone. Wildfire can kill resident trees, and thus provide establishment opportunities for migrating tree species. However, the role of fire size and its interactions wit...

Northwest China (NW China) falls within Arid Central Asia (ACA) and has a climate dominated by westerly winds, a fragile ecosystem, and a high sensitivity to climate change. Paleoenvironmental reconstructions of this region can assist in understanding the general processes contributing to environmental variation in such arid areas. This study exami...

Extreme precipitation occurring on consecutive days may substantially increase the risk of related impacts, but changes in such events have not been studied at a global scale. Here we use a unique global dataset based on in situ observations and multimodel historical and future simulations to analyze the changes in the frequency of extreme precipit...

Long-term excessive use of chemical fertilizer has led to water environmental degradation. Reducing chemical fertilizer use in crop production has become a consensus, and the effects of chemical fertilizer reduction on yield, water consumption and water environment urgently need to be explored. A field experiment including four fertilization treatm...

Oak-pine forests in the U.S. Central Hardwood Forests are recovering from exploitative harvesting and clearing in the early twentieth century and are undergoing rapid succession changes. Unprecedented red oak borer (ROB, Enaphalodes rufulus) outbreaks in 1999–2003 are associated with the largest oak mortality event reported in the Central Hardwood...

Accelerated tree growth in the alpine treeline ecotone (ATE) has been linked to the recent rapid climate warming. However, the role of tree age and elevation in the growth response of trees to climate change remains unclear. Here, we developed basal area increment chronologies of Betula ermanii from the closed forest belt (CFB) at lower elevation t...

Global climate changes result in the expansion of lower elevation plants to higher elevations. The rapid upward expansion of herbaceous plants into the alpine tundra on Changbai Mountain resulted in changes in different levels of ecosystem organization. However, the responses and feedback of litter properties and soil mesofauna to herbaceous plants...

Pronounced climate warming has resulted in a significant reduction of snow cover extent, as well as poleward and upslope shifts of shrubs in Arctic and alpine ecosystems. However, it is difficult to establish links between changes in snow cover and shrub distribution changes due to a lack of in situ and long-term snow records in relation to abundan...

Extreme precipitation occurring on consecutive days may substantially increase the risk of related impacts, but changes in such events have not been studied at a global scale. Here we use a unique global dataset based on in situ observations and multi-model historical and future simulations to analyse the changes in the frequency of extreme precipi...

Extreme drought frequency (EDF), which is typically assessed by drought indices, is an essential property for reflecting extreme drought events. Generally, EDF varies greatly depending on the consideration of potential evapotranspiration (PET) and the selected timescale for drought indices. However, there is little understanding of how PET and time...

Vegetation greenness dynamics in arid and semi-arid regions are sensitive to climate change, which is an important phenomenon in global climate change research. However, the driving mechanism, particularly for the longitudinal and latitudinal changes in vegetation greenness related to climate change, has been less studied and remains poorly underst...

In previous studies, a 0-1 mixed integer nonlinear programming optimization model (0-1MINLPOM) could only identify the location and release intensity for groundwater contamination sources (GCSs), and the location of each GCS was regarded as a 0-1 integer variable, selected from several locations determined in advance. However, in actual situations,...

Indonesia, as a tropical country in Southeast Asia, has a vast area of peatland forest threatened by deforestation and forest degradation. Peatland forest in Kalimantan, Indonesia, has been overexploited for about five decades. Originally it was the indigenous people, who utilized peatland forests as a resource to produce traditional food crops, fr...

Peatlands are one of the most significant carbon reservoirs in the terrestrial ecosystem. Understanding past peatland carbon accumulation processes and their responses to varying external and internal forcing factors would help reveal the general development patterns of peatland ecosystems and provide useful insights into projecting the fate of car...

The effects of N deposition on the C and N cycles via altered litter decomposition rates are an important aspect of global environmental change. The Changbai Mountain region experienced a high N deposition (2.7 g·m⁻²·year⁻¹ in 2015) and corresponding expansion of Deyeuxia purpurea into the alpine tundra, resulting in changes in endogenous nutrients...

Climate warming directly affects insect disturbance regimes by altering temperature‐dependent population development. Indirect effects of climate change on insect disturbance may mediate or accelerate direct effects via vegetation feedback (e.g. host tree demographic dynamics). However, such indirect effects have rarely been incorporated in predict...

Cotton is an excessive growing fiber crop in the world. In Pakistan, climate warming is hurting the cotton crop. To identify countermeasures of climate change impacts on crop production, it is needed to explore the changes in crop yield and their relationship to climate change. This study, we conducted spatial analysis of cotton yield and climate d...