Wenwu Zhao

• Beijing Normal University

Background Analysing the status of ecosystem services and their driving mechanisms along environmental gradients is highly important for the reconstruction and protection of regional ecosystems. Exploration of the effects of plant functional traits on ecosystem services is important for revealing the formation mechanisms of ecosystem services. Howe...

Grasslands support multiple ecosystem functions and services, and diverse biota, and are critical for human well-being. Grazing is the most pervasive land use in grasslands, but can have damaging effects when poorly managed. How grazing management and the environment interact to affect ecosystem functions globally is less well understood. Addressin...

Involving the effect of atmospheric CO2 fertilization is effective for improving the accuracy of estimating gross primary production (GPP) using light use efficiency (LUE) models. However, the widely used LUE model, the remote sensing-driven Carnegie–Ames–Stanford Approach (CASA) model, scarcely considers the effects of atmospheric CO2 fertilizatio...

Climate warming is expected to increase growth and expansion of evergreen vegetation in many cold regions, with substantial influences on ecological and atmospheric processes. Nevertheless, the direction and magnitude of changes in productivity (greenness) of evergreen vegetation, as well as their potential drivers, remain unclear in many parts of...

Ecological restoration projects in the Tibetan Plateau aimed to reverse ecosystem degradation and safeguard the fragile alpine ecological environment. However, it is still being determined if the vegetation restoration is successful on a large scale or reaches the expected magnitude, restricting our ability to adapt practices to maximise the benefi...

Recent decades have witnessed dramatically accelerated interactions between human and earth systems. To better understand the changing human and earth systems, and human–natural interactions and their dynamics of change, Future Earth was launched in 2014, providing a global research platform to support transformations toward sustainability. As the...

Drought is a natural hazard occurring with increasing frequency due to climate change. Drought events reduce soil water content and also soil organic carbon (SOC) content, with negative impacts on crop development and food security. This study investigates the impact of drought on SOC dynamics in agricultural systems and the influence of water avai...

Biodiversity loss by grazing pressure has threatened multiple ecosystem functions simultaneously (ecosystem multifunctionality, EMF) in grasslands. Therefore, detecting the relation between EMF and biodiversity under human intervention would provide guidance on the optimization of sustainable grassland management. However, little is known about how...

Declining ecosystem services have prompted numerous studies aiming at developing more sustainable management practices for vegetation restoration. Advances in functional ecology indicate that the sustainable management of afforestation ecosystems should be performed based on plant functional traits, which provides pivotal knowledge for long-term su...

COVID-19 has ravaged Brazil, and its spread showed spatial heterogeneity. Changes in the environment have been implicated as potential factors involved in COVID-19 transmission. However, considerable research efforts have not elucidated the risk of environmental factors on COVID-19 transmission from the perspective of infectious disease dynamics. T...

Drylands with fragile socio-ecological systems are vulnerable to soil erosion. China's drylands face the dual threat of water (WAE) and wind erosion (WIE). To mitigate soil erosion in drylands, China has implemented numerous ecological restoration measures. However, whether vegetation and soil have different effects on soil erodibility for water er...

Afforestation and grassland restoration have been proposed as important pathways for nature-based solutions. However, the effects of different ecological restoration projects on multiple ecosystem services are poorly understood, inhibiting our ability to maximize ecosystem services for further restoration. Here, we provide a comprehensive assessmen...

Establishing nature reserves (NRs) is a common method to avoid biodiversity loss and degradation of ecosystem services (ESs). The evaluation of ESs in NRs and the exploration of associated influencing factors are the basis for improving ESs and management. However, the ES effectiveness of NRs over time remains questionable, namely due to the hetero...

Climate change is a global challenge that threatens global ecological security and sustainable development. Finding ways to mitigate their impacts is paramount through engineering carbon storage, low-carbon energy transition, or natural climate solutions (NCS). NCS involve a set of measures (e.g., afforestation, land restoration, biochar reuse or s...

The ecosystems of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) provide multiple important ecosystem services that benefit both local populations and those beyond, such as through climate regulation services on precipitation for East Asia and China. However, the precipitation regulation service of the TP ecosystems for supplying moisture and maintaining precipitation i...

Aeolian dust emission is a major contributing factor to soil degradation and environmental pollution and threatens human well-being. Inner Mongolia, as an ecological barrier in northern China, is a hot spot of Aeolian dust emission, which indicates that the ecosystems act very important roles in preventing mineral dust from being emitted. In this s...

The arid and semiarid grassland ecosystems are characterized by limited water resources and are generally vulnerable to climate change. Understanding how plants in arid and semiarid ecosystems respond to global climatic variation is crucial for ecological restoration under a changing climate. Although the effects of climate on aboveground biomass (...

Armed conflicts disturb the environment and impair land productivity. Afghanistan has been submerged in conflict for >20 years, affecting the environment dramatically. In this study, we used the Normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) to investigate vegetation's spatial and temporal changes and the potential underpinned mechanisms. We found a...

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose substantial challenges to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Exploring systematic SDG strategies is urgently needed to aid recovery from the pandemic and reinvigorate global SDG actions. Based on available data and comprehensive analysis of the literature, this paper highlights ongoing challe...

Aim Initiation of autumnal leaf senescence is crucial for plant overwintering and ecosystem dynamics. Previous studies have focused on the advanced stages of autumnal leaf senescence and reported that climatic warming delayed senescence, despite the fundamental differences among the stages of senescence. However, the timing of onset of leaf colorat...

The ongoing phenological changes in vegetation on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau could modify land surface and atmospheric processes. In this Review, we summarize these changes, their drivers and the resulting impacts. The start of the growing season advanced by 9.4 ± 2.2 days during 1982–1999 and 8.3 ± 2.0 days over 2000–2020, and the end of season d...

Ecosystem carbon sequestration service (ECSS), the benefit that humans derive from ecosystem carbon sequestration, is key to regulating climate and supporting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) achievement. However, the ECSS-SDGs relationship is largely unknown, limiting our understanding of how ecosystem services contribute to the sustainable de...

Grazing exclusion has been a primary ecological restoration practice since the implement of “Returning Grazing Land to Grassland” program in China. However, the debates on the effectiveness of grazing exclusion have kept for decades. To date, there has been still a poor understand of vegetation restoration with grazing exclusion duration in alpine...

Lake ecosystems are essential for human wellbeing and development for their capacity to provide multiple ecosystem services (ES). However, because of an anthropogenic-driven ecologic degradation, the sustainable supply of lake ES is at risk. It is, therefore, necessary to restore lake ecosystems and their ES for the sustainable support of future ge...

Nitrogen (N) plays a vital role in the development of crop production and animal husbandry in agricultural and pastoral areas. However, the irrational utilization of N resources and subsequent environmental issues with rapid economic development has attracted wide public attention. Coordinating the economy-N-resource-environment (ENRE) system is of...

The spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 has posed a major threat to global public health. Understanding the spatiotemporal outbreak characteristics and environmental factors of H5N1 outbreaks is of great significance for the establishment of effective prevention and control systems. The time and location of H5N1 outbreaks in poultry an...

Inner Mongolia is located in China’s arid and semi-arid regions, with sensitive and fragile ecosystems at risk of increased desertification, necessitating ecological restoration. However, economic resources for large-scale ecological restoration are often scarce, so it is vital to identify key areas for ecological restoration. Previous desertificat...

Mountain areas have a substantial impact on climate dynamics and are one of the most critical water sources. Mountains were key in human evolution throughout history and supplied essential biotic and abiotic ecosystem services (ES), key for human living. This perspective article will study the importance of mountains to ES supply and the impacts of...

Las áreas de montaña tienen un impacto importante en las dinámicas climáticas y son una de las fuentes de agua con condiciones más críticas. Las montañas fueron claves en la evolución histórica del ser humano y suministraron servicios ecosistémicos (SE) bióticos y abióticos esenciales para la vida humana. Este artículo de perspectiva estudiará la i...

Aim: Initiation of autumnal leaf senescence is critical for plant overwintering and ecosystem dynamics. Previous studies focused solely on the advanced stages of autumnal leaf senescence and claimed that climatic warming delays senescence, despite the fundamental differences among the stages of senescence. However, the timing of onset of leaf color...

Soil erosion is one of the main drivers of land degradation across the world, thus soil conservation service has received increasing attention. Limited studies have focused on it, hence this study investigates spatial and temporal patterns on soil conservation service in four large representative basins globally (i.e., Amazon, Mississippi, Yangtze,...

The temperature sensitivity (ST) of the vegetation greenup onset date (VGD) is critical for the assessment and prediction of phenological response to climate warming. Spatial variations in ST, though well documented based on satellite observations in recent studies, have remained largely under-explained. We determined VGD from satellite observation...

While the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) index is a widely employed method of measuring progress in the United Nations (UN) SDGs, as it allows comparisons across countries and regions, it does not usually offer any indication as to how to move the SDGs forward. To address this deficit, we analyzed the impact of the offsetting effects of changes...

Understanding the interactions (synergies and trade-offs) among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is crucial for enhancing policy coherence between different sectors. However, spatial differences in the SDG interactions and their temporal variations at the sub-national scale are still critical gaps that need to be urgently filled. Here, we a...

Land abandonment, urbanisation and agricultural intensification are the most important drivers of ecosystem change. Their spatiotemporal evolution is complex and depends on many factors and interact intricately. These changes affect ecosystem capacity to supply the quality and quantity of ecosystem services (ESs). Therefore it is critical to unders...

The global land-use change is a cause of environmental change. The detections of the change trajectories and scenarios contribute to understanding their impacts on ecosystem services and human wellbeing. China’s large-scale ecological restoration projects changed importantly land use and cover in the implemented regions, influencing regional climat...

Preface: Remote sensing, modelling-based hazard and risk assessment, and management of agro-forested ecosystems

Energy, carbon, water and their interactions determine agricultural production efficiency and sustainability. On the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP), agricultural activities threaten the ecological security of the region, and agriculture itself is susceptible to climate change. In this study, we applied an energy-carbon-water nexus framework to assess...

Under global warming, droughts have become more severe and more frequent. In this context, it is widely accepted that both water supply (e.g., precipitation, PRE) and demand (e.g., potential evapotranspiration, PET) should be considered in drought assessments due to increasing evapotranspiration. China’s Yellow River basin is located mainly in arid...

Background: The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has caused an unprecedented public health crisis and drastically impacted the economy. The relationship between different control measures and economic losses becomes a research hotspot. Methods: In this study, the SEIR infectious disease model was revised and coupled with an economic model to qu...

Soil erosion by water is a major threat to land degradation. The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 calls for massive ecosystem restoration to address land degradation impacts. Due to the implementation of large-scale soil and water conservation programs in China (i.e., the Grain for Green Program), the area covered by vegetat...

Our study uses regional-scale maps to quantify carbon storage and sequestration from different land use types to evaluate the effects of future land use scenarios. We developed an integrated modeling approach to assess the spatiotemporal impacts of land use/cover change (LUCC) on the provision and value of the carbon storage and sequestration durin...

Long‐term, accurate soil moisture (SM) estimates are crucial for climate, hydrology, and agriculture. Multisource SM products are available at high spatiotemporal coverage, but their uncertainties have yet to be fully evaluated in China. Ten SM products (i.e., reanalysis, assimilation, and satellite) were intercompared and evaluated over 18 hydrocl...

The spatial and temporal distribution pattern is an outstanding feature of the relationship among ecosystem services (ESs) that explains links between human activities and disturbed chemical composition of ecosystems. This study investigated the spatiotemporal variation of land use/cover changes (LUCC) and quantifies the change in four essential ec...

Phylogenetic studies on the leaf unfolding date are expected to improve understanding of phenological change. However, it remains unclear whether the response of leaf unfolding date to temperature is phylogenetically conserved among close relatives across differential and harsh habitats. Meanwhile, the phenological mechanism underlying the role of...

Large-scale vegetation restoration greatly changed the soil erosion environment in the Loess Plateau since the implementation of the “Grain for Green Project” (GGP) in 1999. Evaluating the effects of vegetation restoration on soil erosion is significant to local soil and water conservation and vegetation construction. Taking the Ansai Watershed as...

With great changes, such as climate and land use/cover, occurring in hydrological processes over the last decades, runoff sensitivity, here defined as proportional changes in runoff caused by a given proportional change in its driving factors (including precipitation, P, potential evapotranspiration, PET, and parameter m), has also been changing ov...

COVID-19 is ravaging Brazil, and its spread shows spatial heterogeneity. Changes in the environment have been implicated as potential factors involved in COVID-19 transmission. However, considerable research efforts have not elucidated the risk of environmental factors on COVID-19 transmission from the perspective of infectious disease dynamics. Th...

Effective ecosystem management on the Tibetan Plateau will contribute to regional environmental sustainability, and these efforts need broad public support, especially that of residents, over the long run. Although residents’ subjective perceptions often directly influence practices, the interactive effects of subjective and objective indicators at...

The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) has the most fragile ecosystems in the world. Over the past decades, QTP is suffering from increasing external pressures of climate change, human activities, and natural hazards, thus ecological vulnerability assessment is crucial for its sustainable development. This study proposes an objective and automatic frame...

Soil conservation by vegetation can mitigate soil erosion hazard and prevent reductions in food productivity. However, previous research applies little consideration to the interaction between vegetation and climate change in the estimation of future soil conservation change. Therefore, based on the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), Rep...

Fire is a natural element of the environment that can have pervasive and beneficial impacts on the ecosystems. Wildfires can induce dramatic socio-economic and environmental impacts, while prescribed fires can have several benefits. Therefore “fire is a good servant but a bad master”. Depending on the way it is used can be advantageous or detriment...

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a global crisis. Sharing experiences in combating the COVID-19 pandemic and seeking international cooperation is an effective way to facilitate countries’ search for appropriate measures to prevent and control the pandemic. The new local confirmed case of COVID-19 suddenly appeared in Beijing on June 1...

Infectious diseases have caused some of the most feared plagues and greatly harmed human health. However, despite the qualitative understanding that the occurrence and diffusion of infectious disease is related to the environment, the quantitative relations are unknown for many diseases. Zika virus (ZIKV) is a mosquito-borne virus that poses a fata...

Investigating the spatial distribution characteristics of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and exploring the influence of environmental factors that drive it is the basis for formulating rational and efficient prevention and control countermeasures. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the spatial distribution characteristics of COVID-19 pa...

Satellite-based and reanalysis products are precipitation data sources with high potential, which may exhibit high uncertainties over areas with a complex climate and terrain. This study aimed to evaluate the accuracy of the latest versions of six precipitation products (i.e., Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) V2.0...