Jun Ma

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Fudan University

This study aims to analyze the driving factors and threshold responses of the NDVI across different regional scales in Hunan Province, revealing the main influences on vegetation cover and the corresponding threshold effects and providing essential data for precise future afforestation planning. We use NDVI data and its associated driving factors,...

The deployment of Utility-Scale Solar Energy (USSE) systems is increasingly recognized as a cornerstone strategy in mitigating climate change. However, the environmental ramifications of such extensive developments remain the subject of considerable debate, with marked regional variability in their ecological effects, particularly across different...

Urbanization radically alters the climatic environment and landscape patterns of urban areas, but its impact on the carbon sequestration capacity of vegetation remains uncertain. Given the limitations of current small-scale ground-based in situ experiments, the response of vegetation carbon sequestration capacity to urbanization and the factors inf...

Saltmarsh wetlands are recognized as some of the most ecologically valuable yet vulnerable ecosystems globally. However, since the 1970s, saltmarsh wetlands in coastal China have been seriously threatened by the invasive Spartina alternif lora. Although the Chinese government has initiated a nationwide S. alternif lora removal project, the potentia...

In light of climate change, scaling up in situ eddy covariance (EC) fluxes with Earth observation data has been recognized as a viable strategy for estimating the global terrestrial ecosystem carbon uptake, specifically, gross primary productivity (GPP). Nevertheless, the significant uncertainty in estimation (100–150 PgCyr-1) necessitates the refi...

Global changes cause widespread forest fragmentation, which, in turn, has given rise to many ecological problems; this is especially true if the forest carbon stock is profoundly impacted by fragmentation levels. However, the way in which forest carbon uptake changes with different fragmentation levels and the main pathway through which fragmentati...

Plant invasions driven by global environmental changes (e.g. nutrient enrichment) increasingly threaten natural ecosystems. It is unclear whether reducing nitrogen (N) inputs helps to mitigate plant invasions in natural ecosystems. Using ongoing, landscape‐scale N reductions in the Yangtze River, we combined spatiotemporal surveys before and after...

The land surface phenology (LSP) indicators (i.e., start, end, and length of the growing season: SOS, EOS, LOS) are important to reflect the growth of forest and its response to environmental changes. However, the spatiotemporal variation and its mechanism of forest phenology under different human disturbance’ levels are still unclear. Here, we com...

A comprehensive quantification of global forest fragmentation is urgently required to guide forest protection, restoration and reforestation policies. Previous efforts focused on the static distribution patterns of forest remnants, potentially neglecting dynamic changes in forest landscapes. Here, we map global distribution of forest fragments and...

Building height is a crucial variable in the study of urban environments, regional climates, and human-environment interactions. However, high-resolution data on building height, especially at the national scale, are limited. Fortunately, high spatial-temporal resolution earth observations, harnessed using a cloud-based platform , offer an opportun...

Understanding the status and changes of plant diversity in rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) plantations is essential for sustainable plantation management in the context of rapid rubber expansion in the tropics, but remains very limited at the continental scale. In this study, we investigated plant diversity from 10-meter quadrats in 240 different rubbe...

The burning of fossil fuels by humans emits large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and strongly affects the Earth’s carbon balance, with grassland ecosystems changing from weak carbon sinks that were previously close to equilibrium to core carbon sinks. Chinese grasslands are located in typical arid–semi-arid and semi-arid climatic regions, and d...

The Hooded Crane (Grus monacha) is listed as a Vulnerable species in the IUCN red list. Tidal wetland (tideland), the major habitat for wintering Hooded Cranes at East China's Chongming Dongtan, has dramatically changed in the past two decades, but there is limited knowledge about the population and habitat changes of the Hooded Cranes. This study...

Biological invasions are considerably altering ecosystem structure and functions, especially in coastal ecosystems that are subject to intensive anthropogenic disturbances. Spartina alterniflora has been recognized as the most serious invasive species in coastal China, which has received considerable attention from the government and the public. Th...

The desertification reversal is a process of revegetation and natural restoration in fragile dryland areas due to human activities and climate change mediation. Understanding the impact of desertification reversion on terrestrial ecosystems, including vegetation greenness and photosynthetic capacity, is crucial for land policy‐making and carbon‐cyc...

Sugarcane is an economically important crop whose growth and carbon uptake play vital roles in the carbon cycle, food security, and global trade development. However, the response of the carbon uptake of sugarcane to climate variations and the influencing factors are still unclear. In this study, seven sugarcane plantation distribution maps during...

Terrestrial ecosystem respiration is an important component of the global terrestrial carbon cycle. The special environment of low temperatures in the Arctic and Third Pole makes ecosystem respiration extremely sensitive to the response of climate change. Therefore, understanding the response of Arctic and Third Pole (Tibetan Plateau) ecosystem res...

In the original article [...]

Plant invasions driven by global environmental change increasingly threaten natural ecosystems. Whether reducing nitrogen (N) input can help mitigate plant invasions remainsunclear. We used ongoing N reductions in the Yangtze River to explore how N reductions affect native community recovery in estuarine marshes degraded by plant invasions. Using G...

Urban heat islands (UHIs) exert a substantially negative impact on human health and urban sustainability. The role of two-dimensional (2D) landscape patterns in UHIs are well documented; while the effects and contributions of three-dimensional (3D) urban structures remain unclear, especially across different climatic zones. Here we investigated the...

Forests host most of the world's terrestrial biodiversity and are a major carbon sink (Brockerhoff et al., 2017; FAO and UNEP, 2020). Yet, forests across the globe continue to be degraded and lost (Curtis et al., 2018; FAO and UNEP, 2020) resulting in significant biodiversity declines and increases in human-induced carbon emissions (Houghton and Na...

The spatial distribution patterns of salt marsh plant communities and their biomass provide useful information for monitoring the stability and productivity of coastal salt marsh ecosystems in space and time. However, the spatial patterns of plant vegetation and its aboveground biomass (AGB) in a coastal salt marsh remain unclear. This study mapped...

The history of eddy covariance (EC) measuring system could be dated back to 100 years ago, but it was not until the recent decades that EC gains popularity and being widely used in global change ecological studies, with explosion of related work published in papers from various journals. Investigating 8297 literature related with EC from 1981 to 20...

Global changes arouse large-scale fragmentation of forests, which has a profound impact on the balance of the global carbon cycle. However, the effect and process of temperate forest fragmentation on photosynthetic carbon uptake are not clear. We used remote sensing datasets to describe the degree of forest fragmentation and clarify the relationshi...

Grazing exclusion is an important policy currently being employed by the Chinese government to recover degraded grasslands. Despite many field experiments, controversy still exists concerning the effects of grazing exclusion on the restoration of sand dune ecosystems. In order to examine the response of plant and soil parameters to grazing exclusio...

Wetlands, as the most essential ecosystem, are degraded throughout the world. Wetlands in Zhenlai county, with the Momoge National Nature Reserve, which was included on the Ramsar list, have degraded by nearly 30%. Wetland degradation is a long-term continuous process with annual or interannual changes in water area, water level, or vegetation pres...

Urbanization studies are of global interest and mainly focus on mapping urban areas and areas of expansion using remote sensing data. However, information about the 3-dimensional characteristics or expansion of urban buildings is absent due to difficulties in data acquisition. Quantifying the urban floor area is crucial for assessing urban 3-D morp...

Urban green space (UGS) has gained increasing attention due to its environmental and social functions. However, the compound effects of climate change, population growth and economic development on UGS are largely unknown. We selected 107 medium-sized and large cities in China to investigate dynamics in the spatial pattern of UGS in relation to gov...

Urban green space (UGS) has gained increasing attention due to its environmental and social functions. However, the compound effects of climate change, population growth and economic development on UGS are largely unknown. We selected 107 medium-sized and large cities in China to investigate dynamics in the spatial pattern of UGS in relation to gov...

Global environment changes rapidly alter regional hydrothermal conditions, which undoubtedly affects the spatiotemporal dynamics of vegetation, especially in arid and semi-arid areas. However, identifying and quantifying the dynamic evolution and driving factors of vegetation greenness under the changing environment are still a challenge. In this s...

Urbanization is a pressing challenge for earth’s humans because it is changing not only natural environments, but also agricultural lands. Yet, the consequences of cropland loss on pest insect populations that largely depend on these habitats remain largely unclear. We used a 17-year data set to investigate the dynamics of three moth pest species (...

The annual peak growth and trend shift of vegetation are critical in characterizing the carbon sequestration capacity of ecosystems. As the well-known area with the fastest vegetation growth in the world, the Loess Plateau (LP) lands find an enhanced greening trend in the annual and growing-season. However, the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetatio...

Urbanization causes the expansion of urban land and changes to urban environments, both of which have significant impacts on the carbon uptake of urban vegetation. Although previous studies have proposed that the impact of the changes in the environmental conditions of vegetation carbon uptake by urban expansion are generally indirect, the processe...

The long-term “Grain-to-Green Program” (GGP) on China’s Loess Plateau is a major global ecological engineering project which has significantly boosted vegetation renewal. Some studies have found that the rate of restoration is quite rapid during the implementation of ecological engineering, however, the influence of multi-scale climatic conditions...

Rubber (Hevea brasiliensis Muell.) plantations constitute one of the most important agro-ecosystems in the tropical region of China and Southeast Asia, playing an important role in the carbon budget there. Accurately obtaining their biomass over a large area is challenging because of difficulties in acquiring the Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) thr...

Knowledge of the spatiotemporal variations of terrestrial water storage (TWS) is critical for the sustainable management of water resources in China. However, this knowledge has not been quantified and compared for the different climate types and underlying surface characteristics. Here, we present observational evidence for the spatiotemporal dyna...

Sugarcane is a multifunctional crop mainly used for sugar and renewable bioenergy production. Accurate and timely estimation of the sugarcane yield before harvest plays a particularly important role in the management of agroecosystems. The rapid development of remote sensing technologies, especially Light Detecting and Ranging (LiDAR), significantl...

Data and knowledge of the spatial-temporal dynamics of surface water area (SWA) and terrestrial water storage (TWS) in China are critical for sustainable management of water resources but remain very limited. Here we report annual maps of surface water bodies in China during 1989–2016 at 30m spatial resolution. We find that SWA decreases in water-p...

Sugarcane (complex hybrids of Saccharum spp., C4 plant) croplands provide cane stalk feedstock for sugar and biofuel (ethanol) production. It is critical for us to analyze the phenology and gross primary production (GPP) of sugarcane croplands, which would help us to better understand and monitor the sugarcane growing condition and the carbon cycle...

Tidal flats, which are non-vegetated land–sea transition areas, have an important ecological function in the global ecosystem. However, they have been shrinking in recent years due to natural and anthropogenic activities. Although many studies focus on tidal flats in the Yangtze River estuary (YRE) in China, how reclamation and plant invasion affec...

Coastal wetlands, composed of coastal vegetation and non-vegetated tidal flats, play critical roles in biodiversity conservation, food production, and the global economy. Coastal wetlands in China are changing quickly due to land reclamation from sea, aquaculture, industrialization, and urbanization. However, accurate and updated maps of coastal we...

The scale of ecological research is getting larger and larger. At such scale, collaboration is indispensable, yet there is little consensus on what factors enable collaboration. In the present article, we had investigated the temporal and spatial pattern of institutional collaboration within the US LTER Network based on the bibliographic database....

Accurate information on phenology of Spartina alterniflora is basic for observing its growing condition in native and invasive places. Remote sensing (RS) can be used to analyse and monitor vegetation at a large spatial and long time scale. In this study, RS is used to explore phenology of coastal wetland vegetation (Reed, Suaeda salsa and Spartina...

Land surface phenology (LSP) and its trend are important for understanding the vegetation–climate relationship. However, whether LSP and LSP trends for different forest communities vary with the intensity of forest disturbance and the main cause of the change is still unclear. In this study, LSP indicators and their temperature sensitivity (Ts) wer...

China is the largest rice producer and consumer in the world. Accurate estimations of paddy rice planting area and rice grain production is important for feeding the increasing population in China. However, Southern China had substantial losses in paddy rice area over the last three decades in those regions where paddy rice has traditionally been p...

Plant invasions can alter the behaviour and performance of native herbivorous insects because the insects are evolutionarily naïve to the novel plants. An ecological trap results when native insects prefer invasive plants over their native hosts but suffer reduced fitness on the invaders. Although such traps are predicted to occur frequently, given...

Terrestrial gross primary productivity (GPP) is an important flux that drives the global carbon cycle. However, quantifying the trend and the control factor of GPP from the pixel level to the regional level is still a challenge. We generated monthly GPP dataset using the vegetation photosynthesis model and calculated the interannual linear trend fo...

In recent decades, the increasing frequency and severity of cyanobacterial blooms in recreational lakes and water supply reservoirs have become a great concern to public health and a significant threat to the environment. Cyanobacterial bloom monitoring is the basis of early warning and treatment. Previous research efforts have always focused on mo...

Precise estimation of gross primary productivity (GPP), the key parameter in carbon cycle analysis, plays an important role in the research of carbon cycle and global climate change. Vegetation GPP was simulated by VPM model based on MOD09A1 and climate data in Changbai Mountain Natural Reserve from 2000 to 2015. The results showed that mean GPP wa...

Global changes and human disturbances can strongly affect the quantity of aboveground litter entering soils, which could result in substantial cascading effects on soil biogeochemical processes in forests. Despite extensive reports, it is unclear how the variations in litter depth affect soil carbon and nitrogen cycling. The responses of soil carbo...

In recent years, the shrinkage of Poyang Lake, the largest natural lake in China, has raised concerns for society. The regulation of the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) has been argued to be a cause of the depletion of the lake by previous studies. However, over the past few decades, the lake’s surface water dynamic has remained poorly characterized, especi...

Tidal flats (non-vegetated area), along with coastal vegetation area, constitute the coastal wetlands (intertidal zone) between high and low water lines, and play an important role in wildlife, biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles. However, accurate annual maps of coastal tidal flats over the last few decades are unavailable and their spatio-temp...

Global ecological problems demand joint effort of ecologists worldwide. The last three decades had seen an exponential growth of ecological literature. However, international collaboration did not catch up in the same pace, which might be due to the deficiency of comprehension and communication among multinational ecologists. In our study, we revie...

Knowing the stand age of rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) plantations is vitally important for best management practices, estimations of rubber latex yields, and carbon cycle studies (e.g., biomass, carbon pools, and fluxes). However, the stand age (as estimated from the establishment year of rubber plantation) is not available across large regions...

Accurately estimating spatial-temporal patterns of gross primary production (GPP) is important for the global carbon cycle. Satellite-based light use efficiency (LUE) models are regarded as an efficient tool in simulating spatial-temporal dynamics of GPP. However, the accuracy assessment of GPP simulations from LUE models at both spatial and tempor...

Accurately monitoring forest dynamics in the tropical regions is essential for ecological studies and forest management. In this study, images from phase-array L-band synthetic aperture radar (PALSAR), PALSAR-2, and Landsat in 2006–2010 and 2015 were combined to identify tropical forest dynamics on Hainan Island, China. Annual forest maps were firs...

Research data sharing is appealing for its potential benefits on sharers' scientific impact and is also advocated by various policies. How do scientific benefits and policies correlate with practical ecological data sharing? In this study, we investigated data-sharing practices in eddy covariance flux research as a typical case. First, we collected...

Due to rapid losses of mangrove forests caused by anthropogenic disturbances and climate change, accurate and contemporary maps of mangrove forests are needed to understand how mangrove ecosystems are changing and establish plans for sustainable management. In this study, a new classification algorithm was developed using the biophysical characteri...

Validation of the long-term biomass predictions of forest landscape models (FLMs) has always been a challenging task. Using the space-for-time substitution method, forest biomass curves over stand age were generated from a forest survey dataset (FSD) in the Lesser Khingan Mountains area (LKM), Northeastern China and compared with long-term biomass...

We used the forest fragmentation model to assess forest fragmentation in China based on a 50-m forest cover map in 2010. Six different fragmentation types including interior forest, perforated forest, edge forest, patch forest, transitional forest and undetermined were obtained. We reported the forest fragmentation status in different administratio...

The Great Khingan Mountains, located in northeastern China, feature zonal permafrost. Lying on the southern edge of the Eurasian permafrost boundary, the permafrost region of the northeast portion of the Great Khingan Mountains is one of the plant communities most sensitive to the effects of global warming. Permafrost is gradually degrading from so...

Recovery of biomass and biodiversity of forest understory vegetation after fire disturbance has been widely studied; however, how this relationship changes and what are the determinants at different post-fire stages in larch boreal forests are still unclear. We investigated a chronosequence of 81 understory plots in larch boreal forests that were d...

Determining factors that affect the spatial distribution pattern of wildfires has significant implications for wildfire prediction and fire risk zonation, and could also provide scientific basis for making rational wildfire management decisions as well. We chose five factors including annual average temperature, mean annual precipitation, elevation...

Forest fire plays a vital role in the succession of forest ecosystems, and determines species composition, structure stability and species diversity in the forest ecosystems. In this study, we investigated the understory vegetation of Larix gmelinii - Betula platyphylla forests in Daxing' anling Mountains, and analyzed the recovery process of burne...

In recent decades, urban areas in China have been rapidly increasing. This urban area expansion has caused land use changes, which have enormous infuences on regional ecosystems. The potential environmental problems caused by urban expansion have attracted extensive attention from researchers. Net primary productivity (NPP) is the amount of solar e...

LANDIS Pro 7.0 model was used to simulate the dynamics of aboveground biomass of ten broadleaved tree species in the Xiao Xing' an Mountains area under current and various climate change scenarios from 2000 to 2200, and carbon content coefficients (CCCs) were coupled to cal- culate the aboveground carbon sequestration rates (ACSRs) of these species...

The aboveground carbon sequestration rate (ACSR) reflects the influence of climate change on forest dynamics. To reveal the long-term effects of climate change on forest succession and carbon sequestration, a forest landscape succession and disturbance model (LANDIS Pro7.0) was used to simulate the ACSR of a temperate forest at the community and sp...

A hydroponic experiment was conducted to study the cadmium (Cd) accumulation in different eggplant cultivars (common Solanum melongena and wild S. torvum) and the effects of grafting on the Cd accumulation and transportation. 0.1 mg Cd·L-1 was added to the nutrient solution for 7 days after 44 days of eggplant growth. The Cd accumulation in S. melo...