Pengcheng Wang

• PhD
• Professor at Huazhong Agricultural University

Background and aims Leaf litter constitutes a major fraction in litter production in Masson pine forests. However, productivity declines due to infertile soil. In these plantations, fertilization is a key management practice to sustain productivity. Our study aimed to: (1) evaluate the effect of mineral fertilizer on the decomposition dynamic of le...

The stakeholders’ perceptions of forest ecosystem services (FESs) vary among different stakeholder groups. This study, using China’s Shennongjia National Park Pilot (SNP) and Canada’s Banff National Park (BNP) as case studies, identifies and evaluates the preference characteristics of key stakeholders (including farmers, individual operators, gover...

Pine wilt disease (PWD) is a devastating plant disease caused by the pinewood nematode (PWN, Bursaphelenchus xylophilus) that is transmitted by several beetle species in the genus, Monochamus. Once present, the disease is difficult to control. Prevention rather than control is regarded as an effective strategy for PWD management. Central to this pr...

Real-time quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) plays a crucial role in relative gene expression analysis, and accurate normalization relies on suitable reference genes (RGs). In this study, a pipeline for identifying candidate RGs from publicly available stem-related RNA-Seq data of different Populus species under...

Leaf litter decomposition is a crucial ecological process driven by bacteria and fungi, which release extracellular enzymes. However, the effects of mineral fertilizer application on microbial aspects in forest ecosystems are unclear. We hypothesized that mineral fertilizers significantly affect bacteria and fungi in terms of function, diversity, s...

Plants have evolved a variety of complex mechanisms to resist the environmental factors including salt and waterlogging stresses. In this study, we described adaptive changes of Pittosporum tobira toward salt and/or waterlogging stresses by mediating ROS (reactive oxygen species)/RNS (reactive nitrogen species) redox and melatonin synthesis. When t...

The establishment of protected areas such as national parks (NPs) is a key policy in response to numerous challenges such as biodiversity loss, overexploitation of natural resources, climate change, and environmental education. Globally, the number and area of NPs have steadily increased over the years, although the management models of NPs vary ac...

Evaluation of growth differences between clones and families has rarely been studied in slow-growing Cupressus funebris species, and whether such growth differences are related to biomass allocation patterns remains to be revealed and is essential for assessing the genetic selection potential and carbon sink capacity of superior species. We studied...

Changes in land use and forest planting have led to substantial changes in soil fertility and leaf litter input. The effects of mixed planting on the leaf litter decomposition rate in contrasting soil nutrient conditions are poorly understood. To elucidate the effects of litter composition and soil fertility on litter decomposition, we conducted a...

Clonal forestry offers the opportunity to increase yields, enhance uniformity and improve wood characteristics. Evaluation of growth differences between clones and families has rarely been studied in slow-growing Cupressus funebris species, and whether such growth differences are related to biomass allocation patterns remains to be revealed and is...

Both anthropogenic and climatic factors are important determinants of landscape fire. Because the two groups of factors are intertwined and often act simultaneously, dissecting their effects on landscape fire is challenging. We used the COVID-19 lockdown event in Hubei, in which all immediate influences of anthropogenic factors were effectively rem...

The continuous and extensive pinewood nematode disease has seriously threatened the sustainable development of forestry in China. At present, many studies have used high-resolution remote sensing images combined with a deep semantic segmentation algorithm to identify standing dead trees in the red attack period. However, due to the complex backgrou...

The establishment of natural protected areas (NPAs) is an effective means to deal with the degradation of ecosystems caused by climate change and human activities. The area and number of NPAs in the world have shown an obvious growth trend, and their development has ushered in a new bottleneck. More importantly, the management quality of NPAs shoul...

Rapid urban expansion has aggravated the degradation of ecosystem services (ES). The ES provided by blue-green infrastructure (BGI) is a critical factor influencing the urban environmental quality, and its allocation is closely associated with the life quality and equal rights of urban residents. Here, considering the major environmental problems i...

Background Masson pine (Pinus massoniana) plantations are one of the most common forestry plantations in southern China. A high proportion of these plantations is managed as monoculture forests. Productivity in these plantations often declines as they age due to stand retrogression. In these plantations, fertilization is a key practice to prevent...

China has made tremendous efforts in forest restoration (FR), and has established ambitions to govern its fragile ecosystem and improve green welfare until 2035. However, debate still exists over whether FR can simultaneously improve ecosystem services and enhance livelihoods. In this paper, we test the impacts of forest restoration on key ecosyste...

The effects of temperature and precipitation on tree growth of given species may vary across its distribution range. To determine how temperature and precipitation influence tree radial growth, we conducted a dendrochronology-based meta-analysis using a network of 113 tree-ring width chronologies of Pinus massoniana trees from the geographical rang...

Forest ecosystems are in serious trouble globally, largely due to the over-exploitation. To alleviate environmental problems caused by deforestation, China has undertaken a series of key forestry ecological development programs, including the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP), the Conversion of Cropland into Forests Program (CCFP), the Deser...

Vegetation is essential for the provision of ecosystem services. To ensure that ecosystem services are provided, urban planning must consider vegetation cover in both urban core areas and in peripheral areas. This study explored changes in vegetation cover in both urban core and peripheral areas (buffers of 5, 10 and 15 km from the urban core areas...

Forest naturalness is an important indicator of forest ecosystem resilience. It demonstrates the response status of forests to disturbances in comparison to native communities. Understanding the response of forest naturalness to human-induced disturbances is critical for revealing the maintenance mechanisms of forest ecosystem resilience, particula...

Understory vegetation changes caused by forestry management can alter the litter species composition and microclimate in situ, which while profoundly influence litter lignin degradation process but seldom investigated. To reveal the effects of these changes, understory vegetation in plots was treated as: no understory vegetation removal, only shrub...

Climate and land use/cover changes are among the primary driving forces for soil loss, but their impacts are complex because of their interactions. Decoupling their effects could help to understand the magnitude and direction of soil loss change in response to human activities. Meanwhile, the overall and relative roles of land use/cover changes on...

Precise growing stock volume (GSV) estimation is essential for monitoring forest carbon dynamics, determining forest productivity, assessing ecosystem forest services, and evaluating forest quality. We evaluated four machine learning methods: classification and regression trees (CART), support vector machines (SVM), artificial neural networks (ANN)...

Key message The mixture of decomposing litter from three predominant tree species in a Masson pine ( Pinus massoniana Lamb.) forest showed advantages in elemental cycling, and the species component identities were found to be an important driver for the release of several metallic elements. ContextAlthough mixed forests have long been considered es...

Understanding the spatial variation of forest productivity and its driving factors on a large regional scale can help reveal the response mechanism of tree growth to climate change, and is an important prerequisite for efficient forest management and studying regional and global carbon cycles. Pinus massoniana Lamb. is a major planted tree species...

Aims Improvement cutting or harvesting can change the coverage of understory vegetation, which can significantly influence the litter decomposition process in plantations. However, difference in potential non-additive mass loss in response to understory vegetation changes is poorly studied. Methods A field litterbag experiment involving various li...

High planting density of Masson pine (Pinus massoniana) is perceived to have a major impact on timber production as well as understory biodiversity through changed leaf area index (LAI) and reduced understory photosynthetically active radiation (PAR). However, the quantitative relationship between planting density and LAI and understory PAR for Mas...

Vegetation recovery is a promising strategy to mitigate soil loss risk across different landscapes and human disturbance levels. Uncertainties still exist in the impacts of forest restoration on soil erosion with respect to complicated terrain condition and land-use/cover pattern, especially in mountainous reservoir areas undergoing intensive human...

The aim of this study was to investigate the potential mixing effects on degradation of lignin and cellulose in mixed leaf litter from Pinus massoniana Lamb., Cupressus funebris Endl., and/or Quercus variabilis Bl., and elucidate the interactions with abiotic factors. The litter bag method was used in the field experiment, and the three predominant...

Development and protection are both vital human demands in ecologically vulnerable areas. An estimation of the land use/cover changes and their ecological responses could help to understand the regional ecosystem dynamics under various human demands and provide the scientific basis for managing and regulating ecosystems. In this paper, we analysed...

Urban biodiversity has increasingly been recognized by the scientific community and environmental policymakers as a part of conservation efforts worldwide. However, most studies on urban biodiversity focus on cities in developed countries. An information gap exists for urban biodiversity of cities in developing countries. Here we focused on variabi...

Reserve selections are often opportunistic rather than strategic and coordinated, and consequently, many reserves are ineffective to achieve their intended goals of conservation. Here, we assessed the conservation effectiveness of a reserve for the golden snub‐nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) with a niche‐based approach. We assessed habitat...

Biodiversity is an important ecosystem characteristic, and is vital for maintaining ecosystem health and stability. However, biodiversity was often ignored in previous Chinese restoration planning and design due to its complex roles and the unclear mechanisms in providing human well-being. In order to evaluate the response of biodiversity to ecolog...

To determine whether mixed plantations can improve nutrient cycling and to elucidate the mechanisms of such effects, a field litterbag experiment with seven treatments involving Pinus massoniana (P.), Cupressus funebris (C.) and Quercus variabilis (Q.) litter in equal mass proportions (pure litter; pairwise combinations; and the combination of all...

Land use and land cover change have received considerable attention from global researchers in recent decades. The conflicts between different development strategies for land uses have become a problem that urgently needs to be solved, especially in those regions with a fragile ecological environment. The development of scenario simulations is esse...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is an important component of the global carbon pool. It is a critical indicator of soil quality. We studied SOC content (SOCC) and SOC density (SOCD) of the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) area in China. Soil samples from 306 sites across the study area were assessed for SOCC, SOCD and bulk density. Total SOC stocks in the TG...

The response of plant species composition, diversity and soil nutrient availability to different canopysizes and age gaps in a Pinus Massoniana plantation were surveyed in Taizishan, Hubei province, central China. The soil chemical properties of 27 gaps and 3 non-gaps were measured and compared. The study objectives were: (a) confirm whether and wh...

Quantifying the response of landscape metrics to an altering observation scale is crucial to understanding environmental changes and managing ecosystem services. Whereas the scaling behaviors of landscape metrics in spatial heterogeneity analysis have been well identified by previous research, there remains a need to examine these effects in areas...

Forest network development in urban areas faces the challenge from forest fragmentation, human-induced disturbances, and scarce land resources. Here, we proposed a geotechnology-based modeling to optimize conservation of forest network by a case study of Wuhan, China. The potential forest network and their priorities were assessed using an improved...

Supplementary 1: The code of the batch process for least-cost path model based on Python and ArcGIS. Supplementary material 1

Supplementary 2: The code of the batch process for converting the generated least-cost paths from raster to point in format. Supplementary material 2

Plants not only improve air quality by adsorbing particulate matter (PM) on leaf surfaces but can also be affected by their accumulation. In this study, a field investigation was performed in Wuhan, China, into the relationship between seven leaf traits and the accumulation of three different sizes of PM (PM11, PM2.5 and PM0.2) on leaves. The reten...

Forest tree species distributed across a wide range of geographical areas are subjected to differential climatic and edaphic conditions and long-term selection, leading to genotypes with morphological and physiological adaptation to the local environment. To test the ability of species to cope with changing environmental conditions, we studied the...

Forest tree species distributed across a wide range of geographical areas are subjected to differential climatic and edaphic conditions and long-term selection, leading to genotypes with morphological and physiological adaptation to the local environment. To test the ability of species to cope with changing environmental conditions, we studied the...

Relationship between understory plant diversity and anthropogenic disturbances in urban forests of Wuhan City, Central China, was analyzed by diversity analysis and detrended canonical correspondence analysis (DCCA). The results showed that understory species diversity was higher in suburban area than in urban area. From forest center to edge, spec...

The drastic change in land use/land cover (LULC) associated with urbanization is a powerful driving force in local climate and environment changes. The urban heat island (UHI) effect, a phenomenon that air and surface temperatures are higher in urban areas than in rural areas, is closely related to changes in LULC. In this study, remote sensing tec...

Soil erosion by water is one of the most critical environmental hazards in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area (TGRA) in China, where authorities have created the largest water conservancy project in the world. Quantifying the amount and the spatial distribution of erosion over large areas is essential for the effective implementation of conservation e...

Coherent ecological network ( EN ) construction has been considered as an important landscape planning strategy for biodiversity conservation, eco-environmental safety management, and resources protection of recreation, history and culture. Its planning and management attract extensive attentions from ordinary people to managers. To identify the ke...

The soil moisture is a most important ecological factor on the earth' s surface ecological process. It plays an important role in ecological environment protection in Three Gorges Reservoir Area. The geostatistics method was used to determine and quantify the spatial variability of soil water(0.00 ∼ 20. 00 cm) for analysis of spatial patters of soi...

Landscape connectivity was defined by metrics to reflect landscape functional characteristic for it represents ' the degree to which the landscape facilitates or impedes movement among resource patches '. The theory and method of landscape connectivity is an important basis for landscape evaluation, management and ecological designing. It will also...

Forest ecosystem is a vital component of terrestrial ecosystems and plays an important role in mitigating the global climate change. Using GIS technology, we evaluated data collected in 104 plots and the forestry inventory data, to estimate the organic carbon storage in forest ecosystems in the Three Gorges Reservoir region, The tissues carbon cont...

The environment of Three Gorges Reservoir region has been greatly influenced by the Three Gorges project. Data of biomass and productivity in Three Gorges Reservoir region has important implications for understanding the environmental effects on vegetation. We estimated the biomass and productivity of vegetation in the Three Gorges Reservoir region...