Wu Xiao

Zhejiang University | ZJU · Department of Land Management

The increasing global population is leading to a decline in cropland per person, aggravating food security challenges. The global implementation of land consolidation (LC) has created new farmland and increased productivity. LC is a critical strategy in China for ensuring food security and gaining significant government support. This article invest...

Urbanization has surged over the past decades. Global major cities’ land urbanization and population urbanization have intensifying pressures on urban climate, public health, and energy consumption. A favorable vision for assessing urban habitats’ living conditions necessitates recognizing the evolution and current status of major global cities’ th...

The rapid growth of photovoltaic (PV) power generation is recognized as a key solution for climate mitigation and future energy demands. However, this expansion often involves significant land use, particularly on croplands, which leads to conflicts over land use and poses hidden threats to food supply. Addressing the dual challenges of food insecu...

Global food security is being threatened by the reduction of high‐quality cropland, extreme weather events, and the uncertainty of food supply chains. The globalization of agricultural trade has elevated the diversification of non‐grain production (NGP) on cultivated land to a prominent strategy for poverty alleviation in numerous developing nation...

The 21st century is marked by urbanization, with global focus on horizontal city expansion. Yet, vertical growth lacks research due to data scarcity. This study investigates the fusion of urban building height predictions with conventional sprawl projections to offer a holistic 3D urban expansion foresight. We constructed a model for projecting urb...

Frequent spontaneous combustion activities restrict ecological restoration of coal waste dumps after reclamation. Effective monitoring of vegetation restoration is important for ensuring land reclamation success and preserving the ecological environment in mining areas. Development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has enabled fine-scale...

Clean energy has become an important component of the transition to a sustainable future, of which offshore wind power is a promising clean energy source. However, there are still gaps in the spatiotemporal data of OWTs with global coverage, precise location, freely available, and with long time series of installation time information. This study p...

Hundreds of millions of unstable croplands have been underutilized in the time series by repeated cultivation and abandonment, leading to threats to food security and loss of ecological benefits due to frequent disturbance on ecosystem restoration. Understanding unstable cropland and its connections to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is requir...

Faced with a global biodiversity crisis, we need to concentrate our collective efforts on safeguarding Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs), which serve as essential habitats for the world’s threatened species. Clarifying the disturbance and protection requirements of KBAs is vital to the global persistence of biodiversity, which is not yet clear. Here, w...

Nitrogen is an essential nutrient and a major limiting element for the ocean ecosystem. Since the preindustrial era, substantial amounts of nitrogen from terrestrial sources have entered the ocean via rivers, groundwater, and atmospheric deposition. China serves as a key hub in the global nitrogen cycle, but the pathways, sources, and potential mit...

Global food security is being threatened by the reduction of high-quality cropland, extreme weather events, and the uncertainty of food supply chains. The globalization of agricultural trade has elevated the diversification of non-grain production (NGP) on cultivated land to a prominent strategy for poverty alleviation in numerous developing nation...

Coal mining has contributed to a solid and stable global economy. Surface mining and underground mining are the principal methods for extraction of coal worldwide and given the developments in mining technology and equipment, these methods are increasingly generating more and more coal. Surface mining is also a subject that cannot be overlooked in...

Mineral resource development is necessary for economic growth, but its negative impacts on land, ecology, and the environment are significant and cannot be ignored. Identification the mine restoration process in a large scale is challenging without specific mining location information. Besides, how to quantitatively evaluates the ecological restora...

Rapid urbanization and industrialization have largely promoted the transformation of urban and rural space. In recent years, rural residential land expansion (RRLE) has also become a significant problem for the progress of China's rapid urbanization. The phenomenon of RRLE and its impact on cultivated land needs to be taken seriously. From a proces...

Rapid estimation of above-ground biomass (AGB) with high accuracy is essential for monitoring crop growth status and predicting crop yield. Recently, remote sensing techniques using unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have exhibited great potential in obtaining structural information about crops and identifying spatial heterogeneity. However, methods of...

Coal-based industries are critical to the contemporary world's growth, while the environmental degradation associated with the industry is also increasing. In this study, we develop the Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) and map its distribution from 2000 to 2020 using the Muli coalfield near Qinghai Lake as the research object. This index is o...

Grasping cropland abandonment patterns in China can help protect croplands, thereby ensuring the perpetuation of nationwide food security. However, the pattern of long-term cropland abandonment at the national scale remains limited. Here, we investigate the spatiotemporal patterns and drivers of cropland abandonment across China during 1990-2019 by...

Many coal mining areas overlapped with agricultural land in the world. However, surface subsidence and waterlogging brought on by coal mining inexorably harm the agricultural land. Soil moisture can reflect the variation of mining impact significantly according to the geographic features of the high underground water table, which shows significant...

The Spontaneous combustion problem poses a significant threat to the coal waste dumps after reclamation. Spontaneous combustion alters the soil environment and further affects vegetation growth. Therefore, it is essential to understand the response of vegetation and soil to spontaneous combustion for ensuring vegetation restoration. Here, taking th...

Subsidence data acquisition methods are crucial to mining subsidence research and an essential component of achieving the goal of environmentally friendly coal mining. The origin and history of the existing methods of field monitoring, calculation, and simulation were introduced. It summarized and analyzed the main applications, flaws and solutions...

Understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics of global 3D urban expansion over time is becoming increasingly crucial for achieving long-term development goals. In this study, we generated a global dataset of annual urban 3D expansion (1990–2010) using World Settlement Footprint 2015 data, GAIA data, and ALOS AW3D30 data with a three-step technical fra...

The exploitation and utilization of mineral resources have significantly contributed to economic and social development; however, the procession has also negatively impacted the ecological environment. Thus, it is necessary to effectively monitor coalfields, an important basis for reasonable development and utilization of coalfields and following e...

Accurate land cover mapping is challenging in Southeast Asia where cloud coverage is prevalent and landscape is heterogenous. Object-based mapping, multi-temporal images and combined use of optical and microwave data, provide abundant features in spectral, spatial, temporal, geometric and polarimetric dimensions. And random forest is usually employ...

Knowledge about the spatial-temporal pattern of cropland abandonment is the premise for the management of abandoned croplands. Traditional mapping approaches of abandoned croplands usually utilize a multi-date classification-based land cover change trajectory. It requires quality training samples for land cover classification at each epoch, which i...

Spontaneous combustion of coal waste dumps is a huge challenge in land reclamation and ecological environment protection in mining areas. Advance and timely monitoring and early warning in spontaneous combustion process are crucial, and have always been a difficult issue in research and governance. Based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sens...

The development of coal resources is necessary, but it has a huge negative impact on land, ecology, and the environment. With the increasing awareness of environmental protection and the requirements of related regulations, the design and practice of reclamation projects run through the mining life cycle and continue for a long time after the coal...

Land use efficiency (LUE) is considered a significant yardstick for guiding the practice toward sustainable urban development for metropolitan areas. However, existing evaluation methods on LUE ignore the urban function carrying capacity of the urban construction land. This study proposes a theoretical approach for measuring LUE from a vacancy-and-...

Opencast coal mining has a large impact on the land surface, both at the mining pits themselves and at waste sites. After artificial management is stopped, a reclaimed opencast coal mine dump is affected by wind and water erosion from natural processes, resulting in land degradation and even safety incidents. In this paper, the soil erosion and lan...

The spontaneous combustion of coal gangue dumps after reclamation causes severe harm to the ecological environment surrounding mining areas. Using remote sensing technology to determine vegetation heat stress levels is an important way to evaluate the probability of a spontaneous combustion disaster. The canopy spectra and chlorophyll fluorescence...

Urban waterbodies are one of the most pertinent issues involved in multiple aspects of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, waterbodies in large Chinese cities are highly vulnerable to urban-land expansion, which is mostly due to economic development, population growth, and rural–urban migration. In this work, we selected 159 Chinese citi...

Irrational built-up land expansion debilitates urban sustainability and leads to environmental decay, food security, and climate change. Using the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) urban agglomeration as an example, this research identifies the mismatch between the intensity and use efficiency of built-up land at multiple scales. Specifically, the study ga...

Spontaneous combustion of coal waste dumps is a serious threat to the ecological environment and the safety of mining areas. Even after land reclamation and ecological restoration, such spontaneous combustion activities are still active. Achieving early warning of spontaneous combustion is necessary to protect the reclaimed ecosystem and reduce env...

Farmland abandonment, a widespread phenomenon during land-use transition, leads to a cycling or vanishing evolution of farmland resources. As urbanization advances, an increasing number of agricultural laborers migrate from rural to urban areas, causing ongoing farmland abandonment. However, in contrast to the abandoned information extraction and d...

Currently, it is a great challenge for remote sensing technology to accurately map mangrove forests owing to periodic inundation. A submerged mangrove recognition index (SMRI) using two high- and low-tide images was recently proposed to remove the influence of tides and identify mangrove forests. However, when the tidal height of the selected low-t...

Spatiotemporal fusion is a topical framework for solving the mutual restricted problem between the spatial and temporal resolution of satellite images. We pioneer an approach to replace similarity measurement steps in spatiotemporal fusion algorithms with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), building a bridge between weight function-based models a...

Spontaneous combustion of coal waste dumps is one of the main disasters in mining areas. This risk still exists even after land reclamation and ecological restoration. Once spontaneous combustion of coal waste dumps occurs after reclamation occurs, it will lead to repeated land degradation and vegetation damage again. Focusing on this issue, a moni...

Urban waterbodies are one of the most pertinent issues involved in multiple aspects of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, waterbodies in large Chinese cities are highly vulnerable to urban-land expansion, which is mostly due to economic development, population growth, and rural-urban migration. In this work, we select 159 Chinese cities...

Understanding farmers’ participation is crucial for achieving an effective impact on rural living environmental governance and promoting sustainable development. Taking Sandu Town in eastern China as a case study, in-depth semi-structured interviews with farmers, village cadres, and town managers were conducted in this study. Then, a conceptual fra...

The slope is an important objective attribute of farmland that changes with the evolution of its spatial pattern. A growing area of plain farmland is being occupied by built-up land owing to rapid urbanization, while the newly added are sloping and terrace farmland under the constraint of the requisition–compensation balance. Researchers have focus...

Housing is fundamental to livelihood. House prices are not only affected by house quality, but also closely related to the location. In order to recognize the urban real estate market, it is meaningful to quantitatively analyze the impact of location on house prices. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between house price and location....

Conservation management usually carried out for a period of time to maintain the vegetation restoration of coal waste dumps after reclamation. However, the natural restoration of vegetation is faced with great challenges in semi-arid mining areas without management, due to the fragile ecological environment. Therefore, it is necessary to determine...

With bringing economic benefits, coal mining also causes many environmental problem. In the mining areas with high phreatic water levels in eastern my country, coal mining leads to surface subsidence, resulting in surface ponding. The drastic changes in the area of water bodies have reduced cultivated land and changed the agricultural ecosystem. T...

Large-scale mining activities have induced numerous non-negligible eco-geological environmental issues that seriously threaten regional ecological security. Construction and optimization of an ecological security pattern (ESP) can aid coordination of mineral resource development and ecological protection. An innovative method was proposed to constr...

Coal is an important global energy resource. However, the negative impacts of mining are important factors restricting the sustainable development of mining areas. Under the superimposed influences of different mining intensities, different natural ground conditions, and social-economic development, there are large differences in the restoration ch...

Socioeconomic development is often dependent on the production of mining resources, but both opencast and underground mining harm vegetation and the eco-environment. Under the requirements of the construction for ecological civilization in China, more attention has been paid to the reclamation of mines and mining management. Thus, it is the basemen...

The social lockdowns and strict control measures initiated to combat the COVID-19 pandemic have had an impact on human migration. In this study, big data was used to analyze spatial patterns of population migration in 369 Chinese cities during the COVID-19 outbreak and to identify determinants of population migration. We found that the overall migr...

Understanding the spatiotemporal characteristics of the interactions among ecosystem services (ESs) is a crucial but challenging task for maintaining human well-being and achieving sustainable regional development. However, understanding the spatiotemporal interactions of multiple ESs at different grid scales and within different ecosystem services...

Underground coal mining leads to land subsidence, and the situation is particularly serious in the Coal-Grain Complex in eastern China, causing the crop production to be reduced or to be taken out. Backfilling with Yellow River sediment is one of the effective methods to solve the land subsidence in this area, but a key issue is how to select the o...

Purpose The underground mining of coal leads to land subsidence and changes agricultural land into a water-logged area. This study aims to examine the relationship between coal mining subsidence and crop failure in plains with a high underground water table. Methods The Dongtan Coal Mine in Jining City of Shandong Province in China was selected as...

Agricultural work causes changes in land use at the largest scale among human activities, and the related research has focused on the reclamation of natural land. However, given the impact of improvements in the efficiency of production along with urbanization and population migration, farmland marginalization (FM) has emerged as an important means...

Vegetation heat-stress assessment in the reclamation areas of coal gangue dumps is of great significance in controlling spontaneous combustion; through a temperature gradient experiment, we collected leaf spectra and water content data on alfalfa. We then obtained the optimal spectral features of appropriate leaf water content indicators through ti...

Open-pit coal mining has a large impact on land surface, both at the mining pits themselves and at waste sites. After artificial management is stopped, a reclaimed opencast coal mine dump is affected by wind and water erosion from natural processes, resulting in land degradation and even safety incidents. In this paper, the soil erosion and land de...

Land use change has an important influence on the spatial and temporal distribution of PM2.5 concentration. Therefore, based on the particulate matter (PM2.5) data from remote sensing instruments and land use change data in long time series, the Getis-Ord Gi* statistic and SP-SDM are employed to analyze the spatial distribution pattern of PM2.5 and...

Background: Vegetation heat-stress assessment in the reclamation areas of coal gangue dumps is of great significance in controlling spontaneous combustion. Methods: The study simulated the heat-stress environment of a coal gangue dump reclamation area through a temperature gradient experiment. We collected leaf spectrum and water content data on al...

The lockdown of cities in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) during COVID-19 has provided many natural and typical test sites for estimating the potential of air pollution control and reduction. To evaluate the reduction of PM2.5 concentration in the YRD region by the epidemic lockdown policy, this study employs big data, including PM2.5 observations an...

In tropical/subtropical monsoon regions, accurate rice mapping is hampered by the following factors: (1) The frequent occurrence of clouds in such areas during the rice-growing season interferes strongly with optical remote sensing observations; (2) The agro-landscape in such regions is fragmented and scattered. Rice maps produced using low spatial...

Improving industrial land use efficiency is of great significance for sustainable industrial development. This paper measures the industrial land use efficiency (ILUE) in China, and explores its spatial-temporal characteristics and influencing factors by using a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) method. A translog SFA model that characterizes the...