Ping Zhou

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Guangzhou Institute of geography, Guangdong Academy of Sciences Guangzhou

While many modeling techniques have been developed to derive forecasts, frequency estimates and projection of droughts and floods, approaches that can inform how likely the two opposite extreme events could transit or propagate as cascades in time are still lacking. Here we proposed a probabilistic framework to serve the purpose. Specifically, the...

Together natural growth, afforestation and forest disturbance, such as felling, contribute to the dynamic nature of forests. Thus to enhance forest management, water resource management and carbon sequestration, the net effect of forest changes on water yield must be better understood. Here, we conduct a global meta-analysis of 496 watersheds over...

The aim of this study was to develop a regional landslide stability analysis method considering the combined impact of rainfall and the roots of vegetation in densely vegetated areas. A typical mountainous watershed in the Nanling National Nature Reserve of South China was chosen as the study area. First, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) method wa...

Droughts exert far-reaching societal and economic impacts over the globe. A full recovery of drought-stricken areas depends on so many factors that a deterministic estimation of the timing is difficult. This study explores an alternative way to inform how likely a drought-prone region can recover from meteorological droughts over time. We focus on...

Soil erosion threatens environmental sustainability worldwide. Exploring the trajectories of soil erosion and associated drivers is of great significance for combating land degradation. This study selected the highly eroded Loess Plateau (LP) and Karst Plateau (KP) as contrasting regions to monitor soil erosion dynamics. Monitoring was performed by...

Climate change and large-scale afforestation characterize the conditions in the Upper Dongjiang River Basin (UDRB), which is one of the most important headwater basins in southern China. It is important to understand whether, and to what extent, the observed runoff change can be attributed to forest and/or climate change. Using process- and relatio...

Increasing greening of planet Earth to slow down the rise of atmospheric CO2 concentrations is certainly desirable; however, its consequences on water resources are less affirmative and thus are a matter of wide concern. China, as the largest and most successful country of the world in terms of artificial revegetation, is naturally the focus of the...

The activity of soil microbes is strongly constrained by water availability. However, it is unclear how microbial activity responds to spatial and temporal changes in precipitation, particularly to long-term precipitation changes. To identify the spatiotemporal patterns of microbial responses to precipitation changes of differing durations, we cond...

Understanding the complex relationship between evapotranspiration and climate conditions and land surface characteristics is important within the context of global warming and increasing anthropogenic stressors. Based on the Budyko theory, we derived general frameworks for describing how the evapotranspiration ratio (actual evapotranspiration/preci...

Glacier retreat and runoff increases in the last few decades characterize conditions in the Kumalak River Basin, which is a headwater basin of the Tarim River with a catchment area of 12,800 km2. To address the scientific question of whether, and to what extent, the observed runoff increase can be attributed to enhanced glacier melt and/or increase...

Previous studies generally use the traditional composite analysis to diagnose the physical interrelationships between the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and climate variables such as temperature and precipitation. This study presents a simple probabilistic tool for quantifying changes in precipitation and temperature in the wet season over Chi...

The directionality of the response of gross primary productivity (GPP) to climate has been shown to vary across the globe. This effect has been hypothesized to be the result of the interaction between multiple bioclimatic factors, including environmental energy (i.e., temperature and radiation) and water availability. This is due to the tight coupl...

The main purposes of the study were to test the performance of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) and to understand the key factors responsible for generating soil erosion in the Nanling National Nature Reserve (NNNR), South China, where soil erosion has become a very serious ecological and environmental problem. By combining the RUSL...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays critical roles in stabilizing atmospheric CO 2 concentration, but the mechanistic controls on the amount and distribution of SOC on global scales are not well understood. In turn, this has hampered the ability to model global C budgets and to find measures to mitigate climate change. Here, based on the data from a la...

The increasing concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases results in not only the consistent tendency of rising temperature but also changes in intensity and frequency of extreme climatic events, and may thereby impact the structure and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Increasing concern on increasing global warming has triggered research...

Extreme climate events such as droughts and heat waves exert strong impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Estimations of the risks of climate extremes typically focus on one variable in isolation. In this study, we present a method to examine the likelihood of concurrent extreme temperature and precipitation modes at the interannual scale, in...

Investigating the spatiotemporal changes of regional surface soil moisture in responses to climate and land cover changes is vital for understanding the underlying mechanisms of hydrological processes. While previous studies mainly attributed the causes of soil moisture changes to climatic factors, few took land cover into consideration. We analyze...

Information about changes in, and causes of, land use/land cover (LULC) is crucial for land use resource planning. We investigated the processes involved in LULC change (LUCC) in the Dongjiang Watershed, in Southern China, over a 15-year period to gain a better understanding of the causes of the main types of LUCC. Using a depth transition matrix a...

It is essential to explore reliable streamflow forecasting techniques for water resources management. In this study, a Bayesian-wavelet-support vector regression model (BWS model) is developed for one- and multi-step-ahead streamflow forecasting using local meteo-hydrological observations and climate indices including the El Niño-Southern Oscillati...

It is essential to explore reliable streamflow forecasting techniques for water resources management. In this study, a Bayesian-wavelet-support vector regression model (BWS model) is developed for one- and multi-step-ahead streamflow forecasting using local meteo-hydrological observations and climate indices including the El Niño-Southern Oscillati...

The effective prediction and estimation of hydro-meteorological variables are important for water resources planning and management. In this study, we propose a multivariate conditional model for streamflow prediction and the refinement of spatial precipitation estimates. This model consists of high-dimensional vine copulas, conditional bivariate c...

It is essential to explore reliable streamflow forecasting techniques for water resources management. In this study, a Bayesian wavelet–support vector regression model (BWS model) is developed for one-and multistep-ahead streamflow forecasting using local meteohydrological observations and climate indices including El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENS...

Research results on the effects of land cover change on water resources vary greatly and the topic remains controversial. Here we use published data worldwide to examine the validity of Fuh's equation, which relates annual water yield (R) to a wetness index (precipitation/potential evapotranspiration; P/PET) and watershed characteristics (m). We id...

Climate change significantly impacts the vegetation growth and terrestrial ecosystems. Using satellite remote sensing observations, here we focus on investigating vegetation dynamics and the likelihood of vegetation-related drought under varying climate conditions across China. We first compare temporal trends of Normalized Difference Vegetation In...

Soil erosion by water is affected by soil factor, rainfall erosivity, geographical factors, vegetation cover factor, and support practice factors. On the basis of quantitative estimation of soil erosion in the Upper Min River (UMR) watershed (located in the Upper Yangtze River basin, Sichuan, China) by applying the Revised Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE...

Soil erosion by water is affected by soil factor, rainfall erosivity, geographical factors, vegetation cover factor, and support practice factors. On the basis of quantitative estimation of soil erosion in the Upper Min River (UMR) watershed (located in the Upper Yangtze River basin, Sichuan, China) by applying the Revised Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE...

Various disturbances and ecological successional processes shape the structure of forests and affect biodiversity. We examined the forests over a 7400 km2 area in the Upper Min River watershed in Sichuan under different levels of human disturbance. This mountainous watershed represents a transitional landscape between the Qinghai-Tibet plateau and...

We applied the Revised Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) to assess levels of soil loss in a Geographic Information System (GIS). In this study, we used the k-NN technique to estimate vegetation cover by integrating Landsat ETM+ scenes and field data with optimal parameters. We evaluated the root mean square errors and significance of biases at the pixel l...

The Upper Min River (UMR) watershed, with an area of 23,000 km2 in the Upper Yangtze basin in Sichuan province, is ecologically and environmentally fragile. This situation is due to natural catastrophes and increasing anthropogenic disturbance. Forest cover has decreased dramatically, especially along the main Min River. Restoration of the vegetati...

Soil erosion control requires a quantitative evaluation of potential soil erosion on a specific site. The Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), Remote Sensing (RS), and Geographic Information System (GIS) were used to model soil erosion intensity for soil conservation and vegetation rehabilitation in an Upper Min River (UMR) watershed, whic...