Xiubo Yu

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Verified

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• Ph.D
• Professor (Full) at Chinese Academy of Sciences

The population of East Asian geese along migration routes is declining. Accurate understanding of the spatial distribution of wintering geese and estimates of their population numbers are vital for their conservation. Based on satellite tracking data, the migration timing and spatial distribution of geese in Poyang Lake were studied by using time s...

Background Climate change and anthropogenic activities are accelerating environmental changes, challenging wild animals’ survival. Behavioral plasticity, such as adjusting habitat selection and foraging activity, is a key mechanism for responding to rapid environmental changes in the Anthropocene era. However, this shift may expose animals to new c...

Drastic land use change and human activities have seriously degraded the coastal wetland ecosystem in the Yellow and Bohai Sea. In recent years, the Chinese government has implemented a series of measures to protect and restore coastal wetlands ecosystem. However, the effects of this land use change on habitat connectivity and the effects of relate...

The availability of high-quality food resources is a critical determinant of wildlife fitness. Over the past two decades, phenological mismatch - the temporal misalignment between animals’ peak nutrient demand and optimal resource availability - has emerged as a significant conservation challenge. This issue is particularly worrisome for migratory...

he sediment connectivity determined by hyrological processes, topography and ground cover regulates the soil redistribution, hence the sediment budget, and variation of soil properties on hillslopes. Exploring the coupling between sediment connectivity and the variation of soil properties will enhance the understanding of the role connectivity play...

In light of the escalating pace and heightened intensity of contemporary climate change and human interventions, a more systematic and comprehensive approach to research has become imperative for the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within dryland regions. In 2017, a collaborative research consortium comprising experts from d...

Understanding the interactions between the structures and functions underlying regime shifts in dryland social-ecological systems (SESs) and how they respond to climate change is critical for predicting and managing the future of these ecosystems. Due to the high spatiotemporal variability and sensitivity of drylands ecosystem to natural and anthro...

In Poyang Lake, the largest and one of most important wintering sites in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, Carex (Carex cinerascens Kük) meadows provide the primary food source for the wintering geese. However, Due to intensified river regulation and more frequent extreme climatic events such as drought, observational evidence suggests that the s...

Conservation policies have been formulated for coastal wetlands in China, and exploration of conservation effectiveness based on waterbirds and their habitat is important for guiding conservation actions. We characterized the effects of conservation efforts on shorebird diversity, habitat area and quality using long-term remote sensing data, and sh...

Poyang Lake wetland in the middle and lower Yangtze River floodplain provides important wintering sites for migratory waterbirds. Extreme climatic events and human activities have resulted in the degradation and redistribution of habitat over the last few decades. However, the effects of habitat changes on the abundance of waterbirds remain unclear...

The hydrological rhythm of floodplain wetlands affected by natural climate variability and human activities is the driving factor affecting the distribution of herbivorous geese habitats. It has always been challenging to determine its long‐term variation, due to the lack of data on species distribution and broad wetland observation. In this study,...

湿地调查与监测是全面了解和掌握湿地变化，开展湿地保护和修复的前提和基础。 湿地生态站是开展湿地长期监测和野外试验的平台，对研究湿地生态系统过程与功能，揭示湿地变化机理具有重要作用。 系统梳理了我国现有的湿地生态站，分析了当前湿地生态站建设中面临的问题，指出：与国际主要生态观测网络相比，我国综合性湿地生态站数量较少、比例偏低，导致在湿地生态系统监测和评估上存在较大空缺；现有生态站存在层级结构不合理、监测指标体系不规范等问题，制约了国家尺度湿地生态系统监测评估的需求。 研究基于中国湿地生态站的现状，提出综合性湿地生态站布局原则，认为：应反映湿地生态系统类型代表性及湿地的空间分布特征，体现综合站⁃区域站⁃卫星站的层级结构特点，服务国家湿地保护和生态修复的战略需求。 按照上述布局原则，对今后综合性湿...

Floodplain lakes share characteristics of both deep and shallow lakes throughout any given year. Seasonal fluctuations in their water depth drive changes in nutrients and total primary productivity, which directly and indirectly affect submerged macrophyte biomass. To investigate how water depth and environmental variables affect submerged macrophy...

Climate anomalies and increasing human activities cause a high frequency of extreme hydrological events in wetlands, which has put waterbirds under greater survival pressure than ever. Therefore, it is crucial to predict the impact of this phenomenon on the habitat suitability of waterbirds. This study investigated the response of the goose distrib...

Coastal wetlands form a transition zone between terrestrial and marine environments and provide important ecosystem services. Land-use change in the coastal zone has a substantial effect on habitat connectivity and biodiversity. However, few studies have characterized the effects of land-use change on coastal habitat connectivity. We conducted remo...

Coastal wetlands form a transition zone between terrestrial and marine environments and provide important ecosystem services. Land-use change in the coastal zone has a substantial effect on habitat connectivity and biodiversity. However, few studies have characterized the effects of land-use change on coastal habitat connectivity. We conducted remo...

Coastal wetlands in China provide important stopover sites for migratory shorebird species. The loss of natural wetlands caused by land reclamation over the past few decades poses a major threat to shorebird populations. Although habitat loss at key stopover sites has been shown to lead to reductions in shorebird populations, the effects of habitat...

The area and quality of shorebird stopover habitat along the key East Asian–Australasian Flyway migratory route has decreased. The cause is not fully understood. We apply an InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs) model to examine shorebird habitat quality between 1975 and 2020 in the Yellow River Delta (YRD), and link la...

Litter decomposition is essential for carbon and nutrient cycling in wetland ecosystems. The management of Phragmites australis, a kind of widespread wetland emergent plant, is generally of great importance to the regulation of this biogeochemical cycle. In this study, we conducted a 210 days mesocosm experiment to examine the decomposition process...

Vegetation growth is critical in characterizing ecosystem carbon sequestration. Water availability profoundly affects the interaction between climate change and vegetation dynamics in drylands. However, the associations of the precipitation–vegetation index (PRE-VI) and temperature–vegetation index (TEM-VI) as well as whether and how the soil moist...

Although cultural ecosystem services (CES) are greatly valued by diverse stakeholders, the full range of CES provided by a landscape is notoriously difficult to estimate. The resulting lack of objective norms for CES may lead to the loss of the multiple non-material factors that contribute to how a landscape is valued and experienced. This is espec...

Large areas of unsuitable habitat are often included within the extent of occurrence (EOO) of species, such as the EOO defined by the IUCN (EOOiucn), because the techniques used to estimate the EOO of species often depend on topological methods that do not account for ranges of environmentally suitable habitat. Assessments of the EOO of species are...

Hydrological connectivity affects the carbon capture and redistribution over landscapes. However, the contribution of hydrological connectivity to the spatial heterogeneity of carbon sequestration, particularly the spatial variation of carbon retention, is not well covered in carbon inventory and estimation. This study addressed the contribution of...

Landscape fragmentation is considered a serious threat to eco-environmental integrity and socioeconomic development. Although many studies have focused on landscape fragmentation resulting from agricultural production and urbanization, landscape fragmentation from the aspects of patterns, driving forces, and the policy perspective of ecosystems has...

Soil erosion control services (SECSs) are the benefits delivered to people derived from preventing the negative impacts of soil erosion, such as avoiding the loss in soil productivity and preventing the damage to infrastructures such as dams and roads. SECS is derived from the functions of the ecosystems and is delivered to people through physical...

The development of several large‐, “continental”‐scale ecosystem research infrastructures over recent decades has provided a unique opportunity in the history of ecological science. The Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI) is an integrated network of analogous, but independent, site‐based ecosystem research infrastructures (ERI) dedicate...

Coastal wetlands of the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea, China, along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF) migratory route provide important stopover sites for waterbirds. Natural wetland loss caused by external stress has posed serious threats to the population of waterbirds. Elucidating the extent to which species depend on natural wetland and prov...

Habitats provide essential space for migratory birds to survive and reproduce. Identifying potential habitats in annual cycle stages and their influencing factors is indispensable for conservation along the flyway. In this study, we obtained satellite tracking of eight swan geese (Anser cygnoides) wintering at Poyang Lake (28°57′4.2″, 116°21′53.36″...

Study region Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, is connected to the Yangtze River and has been undergoing shrinkage over the past decade. Study focus The Poyang Lake water control project (PLWCP) was proposed to protect the lake against rapid shrinkage. However, the quantitative impact of the project on the floodplain inundation re...

Coastal wetland degradation and fragmentation contribute to habitat and biodiversity loss. We construct wetland ecological risk assessment framework to evaluate the risk posed to 35 coastal wetland national nature reserves (NNRs) in China for the years 2000 and 2020. Our wetland ecological risk index (WRI) is based on an external hazard sub-index (...

The relationship between hydrological variation and the habitat use of waterbirds in wetland complexes is a significant field of ecological research. Quantification of the relationships between wetland hydrological attributes and waterbirds distribution is critical for the success of waterbird conservation. In this study, flood duration (FD) derive...

The loss of natural wetland habitats along China's coasts has contributed to population declines in waterbirds, especially migratory shorebirds. Identifying important shorebird sites is important for habitat conservation and management. We integrated shorebird survey datasets from multiple sources (bird‐watching websites, survey reports, and publis...

Hydrological gradient variations in wetlands have a vital impact on wetland carbon storage. However, the mechanisms by which hydrological gradient variations affect biomass and carbon storage by regulating the soil nutrient contents and plant diversity remain unclear. This study attempted to explore these influencing mechanisms by studying the rela...

Protected areas (PAs) are essential for biodiversity conservation and for the delivery of ecosystem services (ESs). However, little is known about their effectiveness in providing ESs and contribution to species richness, especially in arid regions. Effectiveness evaluation is fundamental to understanding the extent of management enhancement requir...

The decomposition of wetland plant litter is pivotal in the functioning of wetland ecosystems in terms of organic matter mineralization progress and nutrient cycling. Aiming to investigate the effects of the droppings of wintering herbivorous waterbirds on the decomposition of Carex cinerascens Kükenth litter a newly designated Ramsar Site, decompo...

Maintaining and enhancing the beneficial contributions of landscapes to a good quality of life is a major challenge of our time. Coastal landscapes are rapidly changing due to human interventions such as urbanization, economic development, and even restoration policy. These changes affect both the physical environment and interactions between peopl...

Natural wetlands along the coasts of the Yellow and Bohai seas provide key stopover sites for migratory waterbirds. However, these wetlands are facing land loss. Understanding how natural wetland loss influences habitat is important for habitat management. We used species distribution models to report changes in area of suitable habitat and analyze...

Plant residue decomposition can significantly affect the water environment of wetland ecosystems. However, little is known about the trajectory and the key drivers of the different initial mass of residue (IMR) that regulate water quality. Here, we conducted a study of 210 days with an in situ experiment to examine the impact of the change in IMR a...

Aridity regulates the terrestrial ecosystem productivity in water-limited regions. The aridity index (AI) is often defined as the ratio of annual precipitation to annual potential evapotranspiration. However, how the drying and wetting influence the vegetation response and its characteristic along aridity gradient remains unclear. Here, we examined...

Hydrological condition is one of the most important factors affecting the abundance and distribution of waterbirds in large freshwater floodplains, as it influences their habitat and food availability. The hydrological condition is commonly indicated with site-based hydrological data such as water level. Site-based data have high temporal resolutio...

To maintain species population stability and ensure the ecological safety of internationally important wetlands, it is essential to be able to simulate suitable habitat for dominant species. Here, we describe a suitable-habitat model for wintering geese in the Poyang lake region of China, based on the Maximum Entropy modeling. The spatiotemporal pa...

Understanding the home range of animal species can be helpful to biodiversity and habitat conservation. Saunders’s Gull (Larus saundersi), one of the vulnerable birds in the world, has become an important indicator species to measure the quality of ecological environment in the coastal wetlands of the Yellow River Delta. Information about habitat s...

Natural wetland along the coasts of Yellow and Bohai seas provided key stopover sites for migratory waterbirds. However, these wetlands are facing land loss. Understanding how natural wetlands loss influence habitat is an important step for habitat management. Using species distribution model to report changes in area of suitable habitat, and the e...

Restoring and maintaining the beneficial contributions of drylands to improve people’s livelihoods in them are often crucial to both local well-being and global sustainable development. The non-material links between people and dryland ecosystems are largely ignored and its integration into dryland restoration and management remains a challenge. Th...

Drylands play major roles in the terrestrial carbon cycle and mitigation of climate change. Understanding the dynamics of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks under land use change and management is essential for achieving soil C sequestration through land-based solutions for drylands. In this paper, we briefly reviewed the literature to evaluate the i...

Though shrub encroachment have various negative impacts on rangeland, there is a large area of shrub planted on degraded rangeland due to the persistence of shrub systems to water shortage and the value for utilization. Focusing on the role of hydrological connectivity and sediment connectivity played in the ecosystem dynamic, this paper first reve...

Social-ecological system (SES) management plays an important role in terrestrial carbon dynamics and human well-being in fragile drylands. Over the past four decades, the Chinese Ecosystem Research Network has accumulated valuable experience on the infrastructure safeguarding, vegetation restoration, and watershed improvements, and has made substan...

Most of the world’s lakes are fed through water conveyance, namely, lakes that continuously receive and discharge water. However, the complex hydrological processes of such lakes make it difficult to determine their specific biogeochemical carbon (C) cycles. Poyang Lake was selected for this study, whose capacity to receive and discharge through wa...

Protected areas (PAs) are essential for biodiversity conservation and for the delivery of ecosystem services (ESs). However, little is known about their effectiveness in providing ESs and contribution to species richness, especially in arid regions. Effectiveness evaluation is fundamental to understanding the extent of management enhancement requir...

Vegetation productivity dynamics are closely related to climate change, and water availability determines vegetation growth in water-limited ecosystems. Nevertheless, how changes in the interactions between climatic factors and vegetation activity variation regulate the relationship between their trends remains unclear. The Normalized Difference Ve...

The Yangtze River floodplain is critical for migratory waterbirds along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF). Greater awareness of its global importance is urgently needed to ensure waterbird populations remain in favourable conservation status, as well as the enhancement of wider wetland biodiversity within this region. The designation of pro...

Given the increasing speed and intensity of ongoing climate change and human interventions, more systematic research is needed to realize the Sustainable Development Goals in drylands. The current research status of drylands globally was reviewed together with a conceptual framework that included four key themes: (1) dryland social-ecological syste...

Soil erosion, a widely-occurring phenomenon in the terrestrial environment, affects land productivity and infrastructure security negatively both on-site and off-site. Therefore, soil erosion control services (SECS) are one of the most fundamental ecosystem services for human well-being. Although previous SECS assessments elaborated the benefits fr...

Coastal zones are key interconnectors of terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Due to the degradation and fragmentation of coastal wetlands, there is an urgent need to develop assessment methodology to compare the health of wetland ecosystems at different spatial scales. This will help efficiently develop and implement protections using easy-to-access...

Habitat loss is widely regarded as one of the most destructive factors threatening native biodiversity. Because migratory waterbirds include some of the most globally endangered species, information on their sensitivity to landscape would benefit their conservation. While citizen science data on waterbird species occurrence are subjected to various...

In order to enhance and restore the ecosystems of natural capital in African arid regions, the Global Dryland Ecosystem Programme (G-DEP) consultative meeting was hosted in Dakar, Senegal, from 23 to 25 September 2019. This paper details the first African meeting of the G-DEP. Consultative meeting reviewed preceding dryland ecosystems case studies,...

A major challenge today and in the future is to maintain or enhance the beneficial contributions of landscapes to the quality of life of people. Neglecting cultural ecosystem services (CES) in landscape planning can lead to loss of unique cultural landscapes and undermine the well-being of local communities. Despite a rapidly increasing body of lit...

Wetlands provide ecosystem services for regional development, and, thus, have considerable economic value. In this study, a combination of evaluation methods was carried out to evaluate the wetland ecosystem services provided by national nature reserves in 11 coastal provinces/municipalities in China. We constructed a literature database containing...

The inundation areas of floodplains are crucial to wetland ecosystems, especially in supporting biodiversity. Accurately identifying the spatial and temporal patterns of inundation areas is important for understanding floodplain ecosystem processes. Here, lakes in the Yangtze River Floodplain were divided into two types according to hydrological co...

Chinese coastal wetlands in the Yellow and Bohai Seas provide a network of breeding, stopover, and wintering sites that are critical for the survival of many migratory waterbird species. However, land use change, particularly from coastal reclamation, has caused severe population declines of waterirds. Although 19 sites, covering 1.51 million hecta...

Tidal flats throughout the Yellow and Bohai Seas provide essential habitat for migrating shorebirds along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. Land reclamation threatens this habitat. Using bird-sighting data and environmental variables, we identify areas appropriate for prioritized protection for 46 shorebird species, using a MaxEnt species distrib...

The Yellow Sea is shared by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK). It contains one of the largest areas of tidal flats globally and has international importance for biodiversity. Yellow Sea coastal wetlands, especially tidal flats, also provide diverse ecosystem servic...

Habitat degradation and fragmentation have been the leading cause of reduced fishery yields in many freshwater ecosystems around the world. In Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, recent hydrological changes driven by the operation of Three Gorges Dam (TGD) and drought have caused a drastic loss of fishery resources. In response, mana...

The estimation of wetland plant biomass is key to understanding the dynamic changes of the structure and functions of wetland ecosystems. Relatively few studies on the spatiotemporal dynamics of wetland plant biomass have been conducted because of the difficulties in obtaining detailed and accurate data. Carex cinerascens meadows are important patc...

From November 2016 to April 2017, the decomposition of Carex. cinerascens Kükenth litter along the natural gradients of groundwater level at Poyang Lake wetland beach were simulated using litterbag technique. The depth of the underground water table of the G-L was −25 to −50 cm, while those of G-ML, G-MH and G-H ranged from −15 to −25 cm, −5 to −15...

Sustaining multiple ecosystem service benefits in transboundary river basins is a complex and challenging task in the developing world. This can be attributed to conflicting conservation and human development needs and exacerbated by climate change impacts, especially episodic drought and flooding events. We use a case study from Rwanda in the Kage...

Invasion by exotic plant species and herbivory can individually alter native plant species diversity, but their interactive effects in structuring native plant communities remain little studied. Many exotic plant species escape from their co-evolved specialized herbivores in their native range (in accordance with the enemy release hypothesis). When...

The population of shorebirds in the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF) has severely declined over the past several decades. One reason for this condition is low survival in stopover sites in the Yellow Sea Ecoregion (YSE) due to habitat degradation. Here, we focused on shorebird habitat quality in the Yellow River Delta (YRD), which is a represe...

Environmental assessments estimate, evaluate and predict the consequences of natural processes and human activities on the environment. Long-term ecosystem observation and research networks (LTERs) are potentially valuable infrastructure to support environmental assessments. However, very few environmental assessments have successfully incorporated...

Landscape change caused by ecological restoration projects has both positive and negative influences on human livelihoods, yet surprisingly little research on the cultural consequences of ecological restoration in agricultural landscapes has taken place. Cultural consequences can be captured in the ecosystem services framework as cultural ecosystem...

Since its founding in 1993 the International Long-term Ecological Research Network (ILTER) has gone through pronounced development phases. The current network comprises 44 active member LTER networks representing 700 LTER Sites and ~ 80 LTSER Platforms across all continents, active in the fields of ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological rese...

To reveal the response of soil microbial community structure to the changes of ground water level, a 200m × 300m field experimental site was setup in the beach of Baisha Lake, a typical shallow lake of the Poyang Lake Wetlands. This site included 4 ground water levels: GT-A, GT-B, GT-C, GT-D (moving from shore to center). Phospholipid fatty acids (...

Water table affects litter decomposition in wetlands, but its effects on the degradation of cellulose and lignin are poorly understood. We performed a decomposition experiment in Poyang Lake Wetland, to determine how water table affected the degradation of cellulose and lignin. After 60 days of decomposition at a site with a relatively highly water...

Water level, an important hydrological factor in shallow lakes, has great influence on chemical processes. Wetland plants have become an important means of ecological restoration, but the problem of producing pollution after the plant decaying has been paid extensive attention. Base on the observation of water nutrients concentration of Lake Baisha...

Fire causes disturbance of wetland ecosystems and has a major influence on soil microbial communities, plant growth and ecosystem function. However, the impact of fire disturbance on soil microbial metabolism and its relationship with plant growth remains poorly understood. Burned zones, unburned zones and transition zones with low intensity fire w...

Land–sea ecological connectivity refers to the interaction (convenience or hindrance) of certain physical, chemical and biological processes between terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Research on land–sea ecological connectivity can provide important scientific bases for the conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems in terrestrial...

The expanding economical activities have accelerated losses of biodiversity and ecosystem services, which are especially pronounced in Asia. To find solutions to stop these losses, a group of scientists studying both ecological and social sciences has launched an interdisciplinary research network, entitled TSUNAGARI (Trans-System, UNified Approach...

Poyang Lake is one of the most important wintering habitats for cranes in China, and thousands of cranes including Siberian Crane (leucogeranus leucogeranus), White-naped Crane (Grus vipio), Hooded Crane (G. monacha) and Common Crane (G. grus) winter here annually. Despite their different conservation status, the four cranes have substantial ecolog...