Xiangming Xiao

University of Oklahoma | ou · Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology

https://www.grss-ieee.org/publications/call-for-papers/jstars-special-issues/

Understanding the status and changes of plant diversity in rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) plantations is essential for sustainable plantation management in the context of rapid rubber expansion in the tropics, but remains very limited at the continental scale. In this study, we investigated plant diversity from 10-meter quadrats in 240 different rubbe...

The urban heat island (UHI) effect is intensifying with increasing urbanization. As an important representation of the UHI effect and urban thermal environment, it is critical to investigate the importance of the assessment of urban spatial form (USF) indicators on land surface temperature (LST) to alleviate urban thermal environment problems. Ther...

Due to the differences in land cover and natural surroundings within cities, residents in various regions face different thermal risks. Therefore, this study combined multi-source data to analyze the relationship between urban heat risk and local climate zones (LCZ). We found that in downtown Shenyang, the building-type LCZ was mainly found in urba...

Land surface temperature (LST) is subject to location and environmental influences, which makes quantification difficult in terms of timeliness. Based on 10-d geostationary satellite LST TCI products, we quantitatively evaluated the thermal environment differentiation of various ground objects in North, South, and Northwest China from 2017 to 2021....

Coastal zones are essential ecosystems due to their provision of invaluable ecosystem services. However, the geomorphologic characteristics of coastal zones are becoming more complex and changeable due to global warming, sea-level rise (SLR), and the intensification of anthropogenic activities. Therefore, accurate and timely knowledge of coastal la...

Biological invasions are considerably altering ecosystem structure and functions, especially in coastal ecosystems that are subject to intensive anthropogenic disturbances. Spartina alterniflora has been recognized as the most serious invasive species in coastal China, which has received considerable attention from the government and the public. Th...

Coastal wetlands provide essential ecosystem goods and services but are extremely vulnerable to sea-level rise, extreme climate, and human activities, especially the coastal wetlands in large river deltas, which are regarded as "natural recorders" of changes in estuarine environments. In addition to the area (loss or gain) and quality (degradation...

Tourism development has influenced industrial structure changes and has become a major driving force for China's new urbanization. However, the development will negatively impact natural resources and the ecological environment and will become an essential driving factor for land use change. Therefore, understanding the impact of tourism urbanizati...

Woody plant encroachment has been long observed in the southern Great Plains (SGP) of the United States. However, our understanding of its spatiotemporal variability, which is the basis for informed and targeted management strategy, is still poor. This study investigates the encroachment of evergreen forest, which is the most important encroachment...

Conflicts between forest conservation and socio-economic development in the Brazilian Legal Amazon (BLA) have persisted for years but the effects of Indigenous territory (ITs) and protected area (PAs) status on deforestation there remain unclear. To address this issue, we analysed time-series satellite images and qualified annual forest area in the...

Many forest cover maps have been generated by using optical and/or microwave images and various forest definitions, but these forest cover maps have large discrepancies. Both forest definition and validation data used for accuracy assessment of forest cover maps are often considered as two of the major factors for the discrepancy among these forest...

The rapid growth of coastal aquaculture has strongly supported global food security and economic development of coastal areas in the past few decades but has also caused remarkable impacts on coastal ecosystems. Accurate delineation of coastal aquaculture extent and changes is thus significant for improving coastal zone management toward sustainabi...

The urban development boundary (UDB) is a core issue in territorial spatial planning and remains a research focus in urban development. However, in the past, land use simulations of coastal cities have had some limitations. For example, new urban land outside the research boundary could not be effectively simulated, resulting in a large gap between...

Siberian forests are generally thought to have acted as an important carbon sink over recent decades, but exposure to severe droughts and fire disturbances may have impacted their carbon dynamics. Limited available forest inventories mean the carbon balance remains uncertain. Here we analyse annual live and dead above-ground carbon changes derived...

The continuous rise of carbon emissions has brought enormous pressure on the human environment. To determine the response characteristics and influencing factors of carbon emissions and land surface temperature (LST), we used the land use, LST, carbon emissions, and socioeconomic data of Guangdong Province in 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2017 through Spea...

Warming and cooling e ects of local climate zones on urban thermal environment. Understanding the thermal characteristics and contribution ranking of local climate zones (LCZs) is essential since they can help in maintaining environmental harmony. However, previous studies only considered independent e ects and could not analyze the combined e ects...

In the original article [...]

Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries to natural disasters such as droughts in the world. The pre-monsoon Aus rice in Bangladesh depends on rainfall and is threatened by increasing droughts. However, limited information on the changes in Aus rice as well as droughts hamper our understanding of the country’s agricultural resilience and...

Urbanization has been accelerating; hence the effect of urban heat island (UHI) has increased. There has been extensive research on spatiotemporal UHI changes and drivers, however, data on the dominant seasonal factors of UHIs and the differences along urban-rural gradients remain limited. Based on Luojia-1A, Landsat 8, and moderate resolution imag...

High urban temperatures affect city livability and may be harmful for inhabitants. Analyzing spatial and temporal differences in surface temperature and the thermal impact of urban morphological heterogeneity can promote strategies to improve the insulation of the urban thermal environment. Therefore, we analyzed the diurnal variation of land surfa...

Australia experienced multi-year drought and record high temperatures, and massive forest fires occurred across the southeast in 2019 and early 2020. In the fire-affected forest areas, understory and often tree canopies were burned, and in-situ observations in late 2020 reported rapid vegetation recovery, including grasses, shrubs, and tree canopie...

Crop growth models are powerful tools for predicting crop growth and yield. Gross primary production (GPP) is a major photosynthetic flux that is directly linked to crop grain yield. To better understand the potential of GPP for regional crop yield estimation, in this study, a novel crop data-model assimilation (CDMA) framework was proposed that as...

Data and knowledge of surface water bodies (SWB), including large lakes and reservoirs (surface water areas > 1 km2), are critical for the management and sustainability of water resources. However, the existing global or national dam datasets have large georeferenced coordinate offsets for many reservoirs, and some datasets have not reported reserv...

Large-scale land surface phenology (LSP) information has been developed from remote sensing-based vegetation indices (VIs) data. However, there are considerable discrepancies and uncertainties in the LSP data products for the start and end of growing seasons (SOS; EOS) as different vegetation indices and algorithms are used. Here, we used the TROPO...

Accurate mapping of built-up land is essential for urbanization monitoring and ecosystem research. At present, remote sensing is one of the primary means used for real-time and accurate surveying and mapping of built-up land, due to the long time series and multi-information advantages of existing remote sensing images and the ability to obtain hig...

The phenology-based approach has proven effective for paddy rice mapping due to the unique flooding and transplanting features of rice during the early growing season. However, the method may be greatly affected if no valid observations are available during the flooding and rice transplanting phase. Here, we compare the effects of data availability...

Spatial-temporal dynamics of aboveground biomass (AGB) and forest area affect the carbon cycle, climate, and biodiversity in the Brazilian Amazon. Here we investigate inter-annual changes of AGB and forest area by analyzing satellite-based annual AGB and forest area datasets. We found the gross forest area loss was larger in 2019 than in 2015, poss...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes and evapotranspiration (ET) during the non-growing season can contribute significantly to the annual carbon and water budgets of agroecosystems. Comparative studies of vegetation phenology and the dynamics of CO2 fluxes and ET during the dormant season of native tallgrass prairies from different landscape positions under...

With increasing urbanization, the urban heat island (UHI) effect has become a critical urban environmental problem. Many factors affect the formation of UHIs, and urban canopy ventilation is considered a crucial method for reducing the UHI effect. This study proposed an improved ventilation corridor (VC) identification method known as the neighborh...

With the accelerated rate of urbanization, reasonable identification of urban functional zones has been increasingly important to urban development. In this study, we used OpenStreetMap and point of interest data combined with the classification standard of urban construction land, to identify the urban functional zones. In addition, Landsat 8 remo...

Resource-based urban agglomerations often encounter greater challenges in the sustainable development of human settlements. The aim of this study is to propose an approach to the coordinated development of competitiveness by analyzing the interaction of human settlements competitiveness (HSC) in resource-based urban agglomerations. Through the comp...

The acceleration of global urbanization has increased the frequency of the urban heat island (UHI) effect and heatwaves, which seriously endanger human health. We used Shenzhen as a case study to examine the daytime and nighttime differences in UHI intensity (UHII), considering different local climate zones (LCZs) and sea-land breezes. The diurnal...

Urban ventilation corridors introduce fresh air into urban interiors and improve urban livability, while mitigating the urban heat island (UHI) effect. However, few studies have assessed the impact of urban ventilation corridors on UHI intensity (UHII) from the perspective of the local climates of different cities. Therefore, this study integrated...

Agricultural sustainability relies on healthy soils and microbial diversity. Agricultural management alters soil conditions and further influences the temporal dynamics of soil microbial communities essential to ecosystem functions, including organic matter dynamics, nutrient cycling, and plant nutrient availability.

China has experienced unprecedented urbanization and associated rural depopulation during recent decades alongside a massive increase in the total population. By using satellite and demographical datasets, we here test the hypothesis that urbanization and carbon neutrality are not mutually exclusive and that sustainably managed urbanization may eve...

Light use efficiency (LUE) models have been widely used to estimate terrestrial gross primary production (GPP) at local, regional, and global scales, which is vital for understanding the carbon flux dynamics under climate change. LUE models express GPP as the product of the incoming photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), the fraction of PAR abs...

Flash droughts can lead to significant agricultural and ecosystem impacts via rapid land surface desiccation. While gridded weather and climate datasets, land surface models, or widely spaced in situ observations are typically used to quantify flash drought development, coarse spatial data limits the ability to determine fine-scale spatial evolutio...

Data and knowledge of surface water bodies (SWB), including large lakes and reservoirs (surface water areas > 1 km2) are critical for the management and sustainability of water resources. However, the existing global or national dam datasets have large georeferenced coordinate offsets for many reservoirs, and some datasets have not reported reservo...

Water shortage has severely threatened the North China Plain (NCP), a typical grain bowl and highly populated and urbanized area in China. As surface water body area (SWA) is a critical variable for measuring regional water resources, understanding its changes and driving mechanisms is important for sustainable water management. Here, we examine th...

Despite increasing attention to rising land surface temperatures (LSTs) and other climate changes caused by urbanization, few studies have considered the characteristics of LST or thermal comfort of human settlements from a regional perspective. Therefore, to explore the regional characteristics of LST and thermal comfort in Zhengzhou, China, we ca...

The coastal zone of China has experienced large increases in population, economy and urbanization since the early 1980s. Many studies have reported the loss, degradation and fragmentation of coastal wetlands in China at local to regional scales. To date, at the national scale, our knowledge of the spatial distribution, inter-annual variation and mu...

Spartina alterniflora is an aggressive invasive plant spreading along the coastal China, spanning a latitudinal range of 20 • N-39 • N, and its invasion resulted in dramatic decline in both native plant diversity and ecosystem functioning. Phenology of S. alterniflora saltmarshes is a critical feature to elucidate the invasion dynamics over geograp...

Flash drought is characterized by a period of rapid drought intensification with impacts on agriculture, water resources, ecosystems, and the human environment. Addressing these challenges requires a fundamental understanding of flash drought occurrence. This study identifies global hotspots for flash drought from 1980–2015 via anomalies in evapora...

Eddy fluxes collected during 2016 to 2019 from eight production-scale multi-purpose winter wheat fields (grain only, graze-grain, and graze-out), managed under conventional till (CT) and no-till (NT), were synthesized to determine seasonality, daily magnitudes, seasonal, and annual budgets of carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes and evapotranspiration (ET),...

Soil microbes drive decomposition of soil organic matter (SOM) and regulate soil carbon (C) dynamics. Process‐based models have been developed to quantify changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) and carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes in agricultural ecosystems. However, microbial processes related to SOM decomposition have not been, or are inadequately, repr...

Sustainable crop grain production and food security is a grand societal challenge. Substantial investments in China's agriculture have been made in the past decades, but our knowledge on cropland gross primary production in China remains limited. Here we analyzed gross primary production (GPP), solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), terrestr...

Access to food, water, and good air quality is indispensable for human life, as reflected in various United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); however, pursuing food security may pose threats to water security and/or air quality. An important case is northwest India including the Punjab and Haryana states, which is the ‘breadbasket’ of I...

Southern Great Plains (SGP) of the United States, comprising the states Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, spans diverse climatic regions. In recent decades, woody plant continues to expand and form forest (above 2 m in height) across the SGP. However, our knowledge of the forest amount and distribution in this region is very limited. This study aims to...

As a prominent part of global and regional terrestrial carbon (C) pools, increases in forest biomass C sinks can be attributed to either forest areal expansion (FAE) or increased biomass C density (IBCD). Accurate estimates of the relative contributions of FAE and IBCD to forest C sequestration can improve our understanding of forest C cycling proc...

Variation in urban microclimate is closely related to the three-dimensional characteristics of cities. To reveal the influence of urban spatial forms on land surface temperature (LST), the spatial distribution of LST and five urban morphology indicators were analyzed, namely floor area ratio (FAR), plot ratio (PR), absolute rugosity (R a), mean asp...

Woody plant encroachment (WPE) into grasslands has been exacerbated by climate change and human activities. WPE may affect local climate by altering the exchange of mass and energy between the land surface and the atmosphere. The lack of studies on the effects of WPE on local climate hinders our understanding of the interactions between changes in...

The Australian governmental agencies reported a total of 149 million ha forest in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 2010, ranking sixth in the world, which is based on a forest definition with tree height > 2 meters . Here, we report a new forest cover data product that used the FAO forest definition ( tree cover...

In the context of rapid socioeconomic development, population mobility has become an increasingly prominent phenomenon and is profoundly influencing urban development. Therefore, when proposing strategies to rejuvenate Northeast China and promoting sustainable development in the region, it is important to explore long-term population trends and to...

Quantification of the spatial pattern of forest carbon (C) sinks in high resolution is helpful to reveal the factors that affect the C cycle and provides valuable information for developing sustainable forest management policies. Here we developed a method using the data of long-term forest inventories (1977–2018) and spatially-explicit remotely se...

The local climate zone (LCZ) and land surface temperature (LST) have gained considerable attention as urbanization continues to increase. However, the study of LSTs lacks a regional complexity perspective. In order to explore the law of urban thermal environment, impact factors of LSTs are identified using GIS spatial analysis and statistical analy...

Plantations of Panax notoginseng (PN), traditional herbal medicine for the prevention and treatment of vascular diseases, are expanding rapidly in China, especially in the Yunnan province of China, due to its increasing demands and prices and causing dramatic environmental concerns. However, existing information on its planting area and spatial dis...

The new TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) data provides new opportunities to corroborate and improve global photosynthesis estimates. Here we report the spatiotemporal consistency between TROPOMI SIF and vegetation indices from the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) adjuste...

Spatial–temporal dynamics of aboveground biomass (AGB) and forest area affect the carbon cycle, climate and biodiversity in the Brazilian Amazon. Here we investigate interannual changes in AGB and forest area by analysing satellite-based annual AGB and forest area datasets. We found that the gross forest area loss was larger in 2019 than in 2015, p...

Winter wheat is a main cereal crop grown in the United States of America (USA), and the USA is the third largest wheat exporter globally. Timely and reliable in-season forecast and year-end estimation of winter wheat grain production in the USA are needed for regional and global food security. In this study, we assessed the consistency between the...

Paddy rice is one of the main grain crops in the world. Accurate estimations of the gross primary production (GPP) of paddy rice are essential for assessing rice grain production and monitoring the carbon cycle in paddy fields with the aim of providing ideal conditions for crops throughout the growing season. Several studies have demonstrated the a...

Gross primary productivity (GPP) of vegetation is affected by air temperature. Biogeochemical models use the optimum air temperature (T opt) parameter, which comes from biome-specific look-up tables (T opt− b− LT). Many studies have shown that plants have the capacity to adapt to changes in environmental conditions over time, which suggests that th...