Xuejiao Hou

• Wuhan University

Aquatic vegetation contributes to lake methane emissions, but changes in aquatic vegetation in northern (>40° N) lakes remain unknown, hindering evaluations of its importance in estimating lake emissions. Here we use Landsat imagery to monitor aquatic vegetation (mainly emergent and floating vegetation) in 2.7 million northern lakes from 1984 to 20...

Harmful algal blooms can produce toxins that pose threats to aquatic ecosystems and human health. In this Review, we outline the global trends in harmful algal bloom occurrence and explore the drivers, future trajectories and potential mitigation strategies. Globally, harmful algal bloom occurrence has risen since the 1980s, including a 44% increas...

River sediments play a critical role in sustaining deltaic wetlands. Therefore, concerns are raised about wetlands’ fate due to the decline of river sediment supply to many deltas. However, the dynamics and drivers of suspended sediment near deltaic coasts are not comprehensively assessed, and its response to river sediment supply changes remains u...

Permafrost degradation has strong and long-lasting effects on anthropogenic land-use activities, contradicting the goal of sustainable development in polar and high-elevation regions. The artificial surface (AS) plays a central role in determining human-environment relationships in permafrost environments. Despite recent progress in monitoring land...

Many lakes in China suffer from algal bloom problems. However, the spatial and temporal distribution of lacustrine algal blooms at the national scale has not been well characterized. Here, we developed an automated algal bloom surface scums (hereafter referred to as algal bloom) detection algorithm for Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer...

Lake Erhai, a lake in the early stage of eutrophication, has been threatened by algal blooms (particularly the overproliferation of blue-green algae), which can have an impact on drinking water safety and the lake’s ecosystem. Understanding the governing factors of cyanobacterial blooms is critical for taking timely and effective action during this...

Algal blooms constitute an emerging threat to global inland water quality, yet their spatial and temporal distribution at the global scale remains largely unknown. Here we establish a global bloom database, using 2.91 million Landsat satellite images from 1982 to 2019 to characterize algal blooms in 248,243 freshwater lakes, representing 57.1% of t...

Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) is one of the main producers in inland lakes. Tracking the temporal and spatial changes in SAV is crucial for the identification of state changes in lacustrine ecosystems, such as changes in light, nutrients, and temperature. However, the available SAV classification algorithms based on remote sensing are highly d...

The lakes on the Yangtze Plain, a critical source of freshwater and fisheries for hundreds of millions of people in China, have lost a considerable portion of their surface area due to reclamation since the 1950s. Landsat satellites can provide long-term collections of high-resolution images and thus offer great potential for hindcasting the lake r...

An efficient and precise spatial sampling design is critical to capture water quality spatial and temporal variations under cost and labor constraints. Therefore, it is practically essential to optimize the sampling locations using limited sampling numbers to obtain the most comprehensive water quality monitoring results considering both the spatia...

Agricultural practices-induced pollution runoff has been widely acknowledged to be a significant source of nutrients fueling cyanobacterial bloom. The impact of topdressing activities on cyanobacterial bloom phenology (key parameters for depicting bloom process), however, has not been verified. Taking Lake Erhai, a typical eutrophic plateau lake, a...

Over the past half century, the Yangtze Plain of China has experienced rapid economic development. Lake reclamation (i.e., conversion of natural lake/wetland areas to agricultural/urban land or aquaculture, thereby reducing the area of natural waters) in particular has greatly contributed to meeting the increasing demands for food and urban develop...

The eutrophication problems in lakes on the Yangtze Plain of China have attracted global concern. However, a comprehensive assessment of the eutrophication status and its evolution is still lacking for these regional lakes, mostly because of technical difficulties and/or insufficient data to cover the large region. Our study attempts to fill this k...

Using long-term Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat satellite observations, the inundation changes of Tonle Sap Lake between 1988 and 2018 were investigated. The results show that the inundation area was stable before 2000, followed by a significant shrinking trend between 2000 and 2018. Quantitative remote sensing ret...

Satellite remote sensing has been widely used to effectively monitor the water quality of inland and coastal environments. Using satellite-derived reflectance data from the Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (L5TM) as a proxy for algal bloom intensity, Ho et al. 1 showed an increase in peak summertime bloom intensity in 68% of the 71 large lakes worldwide f...

The revised universal soil loss equation (RUSLE) was used to obtain the soil erosion intensity distribution in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River basin (MLYB), where the input data included a digital elevation model (DEM) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) remote sensing products. Changes in the soil erosion in...

In this study, the vegetation emergence times (VET), an important phenological characteristics, were obtained for 25 large lakes on the Yangtze Plain between 2001 and 2014. This was carried out by extracting the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series from the moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) data using a deci...

Atmospheric correction methods that are designed for either ocean color or land applications often result in low-quality or even no surface reflectance data for coastal and inland waters. In contrast, Rayleigh-corrected reflectance (Rrc) has been used in water applications, although without removing aerosol scattering. However, a systematic effort...

Using moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) data that cover the 15-year period from 2000 to 2014 and a phenology-based classification method, the long-term changes in the wetland vegetation of 25 large lakes on the Yangtze Plain were obtained. The classification method was developed based on the phenological information extracted fr...

Basin-scale water volumes of lakes and reservoirs are difficult to obtain due to a number of challenges. In this study, area-based water storage estimation models are proposed for large lakes and reservoirs in the Yangtze River Basin (YRB). The models are subsequently applied to Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) observations of...