Le Yu

The ecosystem integrity of protected area (PA) is critical for biodiversity conservation, and is emphasized as a long-term goal and an action target in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). However, there is a lack of systematic review on ecological integrity assessments in PAs that consider various ecosystem types and spatial s...

Afforestation of abandoned cropland represents a promising strategy for land-based climate change mitigation, particularly in regions where land resources for additional afforestation are limited. However, the carbon sequestration potential of such land remains largely unknown. Here, we assess the spatial distribution of abandoned cropland in China...

Extreme weather events pose significant challenges to crop production, making their assessment essential for developing effective climate adaptation strategies. Process-based crop models are valuable for evaluating climate change impacts on crop yields but often struggle to simulate the effects of extreme weather accurately. To fill this knowledge...

Non-technical summary Climate change is significantly altering our planet, with greenhouse gas emissions and environmental changes bringing us closer to critical tipping points. These changes are impacting species and ecosystems worldwide, leading to the urgent need for understanding and mitigating climate change risks. In this study, we examined g...

Urbanization have been significantly reshaping the form of urban areas and natural landscapes, leading to complex urban morphologies. In 2012, the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification was proposed to address this issue and has since been widely adopted in urban climate studies globally. Despite its prevalence, literature on dynamic mapping of ur...

The same cumulative carbon emission reduction target can correspond to multiple emission reduction pathways. This study explores how different coal power transition pathways with the same cumulative emissions reductions impact the transition costs, by assessing the dynamic transition processes for coal plants adopting multiple mitigation technologi...

2023 was a landmark year for climate change globally, across Asia, and within China. Global average temperatures were 1·45°C higher than the pre-industrial average, making it the warmest year on record since 1850. In Asia, 2023 was the second-hottest year documented. China recorded its highest-ever average temperature at 10·71°C (0·82°C above the 1...

Urban greenways are pivotal in enriching urban quality and fostering socio-ecological sustainability. Previous studies on urban greenway networks have often overlooked user-based experience efficiency, leading to the underutilization and insufficient translation of cultural services into human well-being. In this study, we introduce a user behavior...

In the metacoupling Anthropocene, tourism-based culture ecosystem services flows (CESF) can establish non-material bridges from the natural to the human system, even across vast geographic distances. However, there remains a knowledge gap regarding investigation of nature-related tourist travel patterns at geographic flow scales. To address this ga...

Accurate, detailed, and long-term urban land use mapping is crucial for urban planning, environmental assessment, and health evaluation. Despite previous efforts, mapping essential urban land use categories (EULUCs) across multiple periods remains challenging, primarily due to the scarcity of enduring consistent socio-geographical data, such as the...

Protected areas are typically considered a cornerstone of conservation programs and play a fundamental role in protecting natural areas and biodiversity. Human‐driven land‐use and land‐cover (LULC) changes lead to habitat loss and biodiversity loss inside protected areas, impairing their effectiveness. However, the global dynamics of habitat qualit...

China prioritizes a coordinated and sustainable shift from rural to urban areas, termed rural-urban transformation. This involves land, population, and industry urbanization. Here we explore the spatiotemporal dynamics of rural-urban transformation patterns in China, focusing on the degree of integrated transformation and the coupling between the t...

Northwest China has undergone notable alterations in climate and vegetation growth in recent decades. Nevertheless, uncertainties persist concerning the response of different vegetation types to climate change and the underlying mechanisms. This study utilized the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and three sets of meteorological data t...

Land system science has gained prominence over the past few decades due to its role in promoting sustainable development. However, there are still key advancements needed to support land system science in meeting the challenges ahead and further contribute to the achievement of sustainable development. Therefore, this paper uses scientometrics to e...

Mapping spatiotemporal dynamics of crop-specific areas is of great significance in addressing challenges faced by agricultural systems. But comparable multi-phase crop maps in year series have not yet been developed in most regions of the global. In this study, we developed a framework for updating annual crop-specific area maps at 10 km resolution...

In this Editorial, the Geo: Geography and Environment Editors reflect on the journal over the past year, highlighting some of the key papers published and ‘Geo Themes’ being developed: ‘Decolonising Climate Geography’; ‘Climate Change, AI and Sustainability’; ‘Geographies of Energy Futures’. The Editors renew the call for submissions on these topic...

Global cropland expansion has been recognized as a key driver of food security. However, cropland-expansion-induced alterations in biophysical properties of the Earth's surface and greenhouse gas emissions may potentially impact the Earth's climate system. These changes could, in turn, affect cropland productivity and the potential distribution of...

Over the past few decades, urbanization has led to significant changes in land use and cover, impacting urban climate and public health, as well as energy consumption. In 2012, the local climate zone (LCZ) classification system was introduced to better represent the complexity of urban morphology. However, mapping LCZ over a long period has been ch...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the Green School Program (GSP) as a tool for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Focusing on 98 primary and secondary schools in Beijing’s Xicheng District, it employs a multiple, descriptive case study approach supported by statistical analysis...

This paper analyses the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the revisions of China's primary, secondary and high school curriculum standards. Employing a word frequency analysis of SDGs‐related keywords across ten disciplines, the study reveals an increasing trend in SDGs integration, particularly in Physical Education and He...

Greenspaces on university campuses have gained recognition for their multifaceted impact on the physical, social, emotional and intellectual well-being of students. The allocation of resources towards the development and maintenance of greenspaces is regarded as a strategy in the pursuit of sustainable development goals. However, the research on gr...

China, as the world’s biggest soybean importer and fourth-largest producer, needs accurate mapping of its planting areas for global food supply stability. The challenge lies in gathering and collating ground survey data for different crops. We proposed a spatiotemporal migration method leveraging vegetation indices’ temporal characteristics. This m...

The cultivation of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) is globally significant, particularly in tropical regions, due to the diverse applications of palm oil and palm kernel oil. This necessitates precise monitoring for sustainable management amidst escalating demand. This study aims to develop an annually updated Oil Palm Age Database (OPAD) using multis...

Largely driven by agricultural pressures, biodiversity has experienced great changes globally. Exploring biodiversity responses to agricultural practices associated with agricultural intensification can benefit biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes. However, the effects of agricultural practices may also extend to natural habitats. M...

Non-technical summary Oil palm has been criticized for being an environmentally unfriendly oil crop. In recent decades, oil palm plantations have extended into conservation landscapes, causing severe environmental damage and harming biodiversity. Nevertheless, oil palm remains a highly productive oil crop from which most of the world's vegetable oi...

Synergies and trade-offs among land use and land covers (LULCs) pose considerable uncertainties in achieving the dual carbon goals for China's Loess Plateau (CLP). In this context, we unraveled the carbon stock dynamics induced by land use and land cover change (LUCC) in the CLP over the past 40 years using the satellite-derived annual LULC maps an...

Global cropland expansion has been recognized as a key driver of food security. However, cropland expansion induced alterations in biophysical properties of the Earth's surface and greenhouse gas emissions may potentially impact the Earth's climate system. These changes could, in turn, affect cropland productivity and the potential distribution of...

Powered by advances of optical remote sensing sensors, the production of very high spatial resolution multispectral images provides great potential for achieving cost-efficient and high-accuracy forest inventory and analysis in an automated way. Lots of studies that aim at providing an inventory of the level of each individual tree have generated m...

With growing health risks from climate change and a trend of increasing carbon emissions from coal, it is time for China to take action. The rising frequency and severity of extreme weather events in China, such as record-high temperatures, low rainfall, severe droughts, and floods in many regions (along with the compound and ripple effects of thes...

Remote sensing and land resource surveys have been used in recent decades for land use/land cover (LULC) mapping; however, keeping the developed LULC up-to-date and consistent with land survey statistics remains challenging. This study developed a practical and effective framework to automatically update existing LULC products and bridge the gap be...

Land disturbance (LD), commonly reflecting anthropogenic-induced land surface changes, has received unprecedented attention due to its contribution to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 15: life on land. Considerable LD in China, such as urban sprawl, farmland expansion and forest loss, have resulted in a spectrum of environmental problems in r...

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) is one of the most dynamic economic regions in the Asia-Pacific region. At present, it still faces many problems, such as the over-exploitation of urban land and unbalanced development. Through the study of the spatial–temporal characteristics of the development intensity of the PRD region and its driving factors, the ke...

Understanding the distribution and land history of old urban areas (OUAs) and renewed urban areas (RUAs) has become the key point of urban management. However, it is hard to acquire adequate information for lack of pertinent detection methods. Here, we established a complete mapping framework on Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform to identify OUAs a...

The clear boundary between urban and rural areas is gradually disappearing, and urban and rural areas are two poles of a gradient with many continuous human settlements in between, which is a concept known as the rural-urban continuum. Little is known about the distribution and change trajectories of the various types in the rural-urban continuum a...

Leveraging climate actions for healthy ageingWenjia Cai1†, Chi Zhang2†, Shihui Zhang1†, Yuqi Bai1, Max Callaghan3, Nan Chang4, Bin Chen5,Huiqi Chen6, Liangliang Cheng6, Xueqin Cui1, Hancheng Dai7, Bawuerjiang Danna8,Wenxuan Dong9,10, Weicheng Fan9,10, Xiaoyi Fang11, Tong Gao12, Yang Geng13, Dabo Guan1,Yixin Hu14, Junyi Hua15, Cunrui Huang16, Hong H...

A forward-looking approach that incorporates biodiversity and nature-based solutions is needed for climate change adaptation. In this research, we identified conservation priorities in 2050 for Southwest China (SWC) based on habitat suitability, climate stability, and carbon storage capacity and presented the results for 12 SSP-GCMs combinations. O...

Cropland monitoring is a crucial component for a broad user community from Land Use and Land Cover Change study to food security policy making. Faced with the rich natural ecological environment and variable agricultural production conditions of Mid-Spine Belt of Beautiful China (MSBBC), this study developed a novel operational assessment framework...

Urban-living individuals are exposed to many environmental factors that may combine and interact to influence mental health. While individual factors of an urban environment have been investigated in isolation, no attempt has been made to model how complex, real-life exposure to living in the city relates to brain and mental health, and how this is...

Assessing biomass resource potential is essential for China’s ambitious goals of carbon neutrality, rural revitalization, and poverty eradication. To fill the data gap of high spatial resolution biomass resources in China, this study estimates the biomass resource potential for all types of lignocellulosic biomass feedstock at 1 km resolution in 20...

Accurate, detailed, and up-to-date information on cropland extent is crucial for provisioning food security and environmental sustainability. However, because of the complexity of agricultural landscapes and lack of sufficient training samples, it remains challenging to monitor cropland dynamics at high spatial and temporal resolutions across large...

Context To ensure food security in sub-Saharan Africa, it is necessary to improve crop yields while minimizing environmental impacts. Intercropping has been demonstrated to deliver such outcomes, but their performance in smallholder fields has received limited attention therefore insufficient to capture the complexity of real-world crop fields run...

Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) change is a major global concern and a topic of scientific debate. In West Africa, the key trend among the changes of the past few years is the loss of natural vegetation related to changes in different LULC categories, e.g., water bodies, wetland, and bare soil. However, not all detected changes in these LULC categories...

Modeling the global dynamics of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) like COVID-19 can provide important guidance in the preparation and mitigation of pandemic threats. While age-structured transmission models are widely used to simulate the evolution of EIDs, most of these studies focus on the analysis of specific countries and fail to characterize...

Context The dramatic expansion of urban lands has caused widespread cropland losses in China, yet little evidence is given on the progress of such transformation spatial–temporal explicitly. Objectives The present study aims to disentangle the underlying interaction between urban expansion and cropland loss as well as its socioeconomic drivers and...

Global warming has led to earlier spring green-up dates (GUD) in recent decades with significant consequences for global carbon and hydrologic cycles. In addition to changes in climate, land cover change (LCC), including interchanges between vegetation and non-vegetation, and among plants with different functional traits, may also affect GUD. Here,...

Land Use /Land Cover (LULC) change is a major global concern and a topic of scientific debate. In West Africa, the key among the past changes is the loss of natural vegetation related to changes in different Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) categories, e.g., water bodies, wetland and bare soil. However, not all detected changes in these LULC categories a...

An ambitious new Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework "Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework" has been developed. However, the combined effects of climate change and human modification can undermine the potential benefits of the global post-2020 conservation efforts. The co-benefits of stabilizing the climate, conserving biodiversity, a...

Background: Urbanicity refers to the conditions that are particular to urban areas and is a growing environmental challenge that may affect hippocampus and neurocognition. This study aimed to investigate the effects of the average pre-adulthood urbanicity on hippocampal subfield volumes and neurocognitive abilities as well as the sensitive age win...

In recent decades, China has implemented ecological restoration projects (ERPs) to improve biodiversity and ecosystem services (ESs), accordingly, a series of environmental laws were issued to guide ecological restoration. However, quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness of ERPs remains ambiguous. To respond to the UN Decade on Ecosystem Resto...

Coconut (Cocos nucifera L.) is one of the world's most economically important tree species, and coconut palm plantations dominate many islands and tropical coastlines. However, the expansion of plantations to supply international markets threatens biodiversity. Therefore, monitoring the plantations is important not only for the food industry but al...

Recently, many freeze/thaw (FT) products have been developed using spaceborne microwave measurements. In this letter, we compared the newest FT products, SMAP36 (36 km resolution) and SMAP09 (9 km resolution) provided by the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission and one product, AMSR2 FT, generated by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiomete...

As one of the most important agricultural production types in the world, orchards have high economic, ecological, and cultural value, so the accurate and timely mapping of orchards is highly demanded for many applications. Selecting a remote-sensing (RS) data source is a critical step in efficient orchard mapping, and it is hard to have a RS image...

Bamboo forest is a unique forest landscape that is mainly composed of herbal plants. It has a stronger capability to increase terrestrial carbon sinks than woody forests in the same environment, thus playing a special role in absorbing atmospheric CO2. Accurate and timely bamboo forest maps are necessary to better understand and quantify their cont...

As the most biodiversity-rich part of the protected areas system, habitats within the pilot national parks have long been threatened by drastic human-induced land use and land cover changes. The growing concern about habitat loss has spurred China's national park project to shift from pilot to construction phase with the official establishment of C...

The world's forests are experiencing rapid changes due to land-use and climate change. However, a detailed map of global forest gain at fine spatial and temporal resolutions is still missing. To fill this gap, we developed an automatic framework for mapping annual forest gain globally using Landsat time series, the LandTrendr algorithm, and the Goo...

Accurate predictions of wheat yields are essential to farmers’production plans and to the international trade in wheat. However, only poor approximations of the productivity of wheat crops in China can be obtained using traditional linear regression models based on vegetation indices and observations of the yield. In this study, Sentinel-2 (multisp...

Rice is the most important food crop in the developing world, and more than half of the global population consumes it as a staple food. Mapping the area of rice cultivation in a timely and accurate manner is essential to ensure food safety and evaluate its environmental impact. Deep learning performs very well in high-resolution remote sensing clas...

China has long suffered from failures in urban governance, arable land conservation, and environmental conservation because of the lack of accurate and reliable land use data. To fill these gaps, China has been conducting a once-a-decade census of national land use status. On August 26, 2021, China released the third national land survey data, whic...

China's rapid economic growth over the past few decades has been fueled by the fossil-fuel dominated energy system. In Northern China, coal and biomass are important fuel types for household cooking and heating. The use of coal and biomass not only contributes to CO2 emissions, but also worsens the ambient air quality and further causes adverse hea...

Located in the interior of Eurasia and to the north of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, the Northwest China experiences severe drought conditions as moist air from the ocean is unable to travel the long distance and penetrate the region’s mountain barriers. These special geo-climatic conditions result in Northwest China being highly sensitive to climate...

Although widely recognized as the key to climate goals, coal "phase down" has long been argued for its side effects on energy security and social development. Retrofitting coal power units with biomass and coal co-firing with a carbon capture and storage approach provides an alternative way to avoid these side effects and make deep carbon dioxide e...