yi Zheng

• PhD
• Professor at Southern University of Science and Technology

Systematic uncertainty analysis (UA) has rarely been conducted for integrated modeling of surface water-groundwater (SW-GW) systems, which is subject to significant uncertainty, especially at a large basin scale. The main objective of this study was to explore an innovative framework in which a systematic UA can be effectively and efficiently perfo...

Ecohydrological processes in a water-limited environment are sensitive to both climate conditions and human activities, but the response mechanisms have rarely been explored for large endorheic river basins via an integrated modeling approach. This study established an integrated surface watergroundwater model for the Heihe River Basin (HRB), China...

Integrated surface water-groundwater modeling can provide a comprehensive and coherent understanding on basin-scale water cycle, but its high computational cost has impeded its application in real-world management. This study developed a new surrogate-based approach, SOIM (Surrogate-based Optimization for Integrated surface water-groundwater Modeli...

Watershed water quality models are increasingly used in management. However, simulations by such complex models often involve significant uncertainty, especially those for non-conventional pollutants which are often poorly monitored. This study first proposed an integrated framework for watershed water quality modeling. Within this framework, Proba...

This study investigates the presence and health implications of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in human serum samples collected from white-collar workers in an industrialized region of China. Our research offers fresh insights into the underexplored area of nonoccupational PFAS exposure among white-collar workers, shedding light on heal...

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are a large category of emerging pollutants that have been highly concern in recent years. The huge production and rapid consumption demand of PPCPs make them widely enter and highly exist in various environmental mediums. Due to migration, transformation and bioaccumulation, PPCPs enter the eco...

While deep learning (DL) models exhibit superior simulation accuracy over traditional distributed hydrological models (DHMs), their main limitations lie in opacity and the absence of underlying physical mechanisms. The pursuit of synergies between DL and DHMs is an engaging research domain, yet a definitive roadmap remains elusive. In this study, a...

Crop production is a large source of atmospheric ammonia (NH3), which poses risks to air quality, human health and ecosystems1–5. However, estimating global NH3 emissions from croplands is subject to uncertainties because of data limitations, thereby limiting the accurate identification of mitigation options and efficacy4,5. Here we develop a machi...

River deltas typically have high population density and support a wide range of intensive and prosperous socioeconomic activities. The hydrological processes in these regions are complex, primarily due to the interactions among the river, aquifer, and sea. However, a systematic and quantitative elaboration of the river-aquifer-sea interactions is s...

Urban green infrastructure (GI) has been widely used in sponge city construction to manage hydrological processes. While studies on environmental benefits of GI from the perspective of whole life cycle assessment (LCA) have been reported in recent years, few have explored and compared the environmental performance of different GIs within a single c...

Centralized vs. decentralized sewage treatment is one of the key issues in the planning of rural sewage treatment (RST) in China due to the country's diverse regional characteristics. There are very limited comprehensive evaluation models for selecting regionally suitable schemes and facilities, particularly for national or provisional scale planni...

To enhance the quality of life and ensure sustainability in crowded cities, safe management of drinking water using cutting-edge technologies is a priority. This study developed an intelligent early warning system (EWS) for alarming and controlling risks from bacteria and disinfection byproducts in a drinking water distribution system (DWDS), named...

Models and information and communication technology (ICT) can assist in the effective supervision of urban receiving water bodies and drainage systems. Single model-based decision tools, e.g., water quality models and the pollution source identification (PSI) method, have been widely reported in this field. However, a systematic pathway for environ...

Land use change and excessive nitrogen (N) loading threaten the health of receiving water bodies worldwide. However, the role of hydrological connectivity in linking watershed land use, N biogeochemistry and river water quality remain unclear. In this study, we investigated 15 subwatersheds in the Jiulong River watershed (southeastern China) during...

The impact of climate change on nearshore coastal water quality and its interaction with pollution prevention efforts (e.g., the development of green and gray water infrastructure) still lack systematic investigation. This study performed a holistic analysis of the impact of climate change on the salinity and concentrations of total nitrogen (TN),...

Watersheds are the basic unit of Earth's terrestrial systems and are therefore ideal units for the study of critical zones (CZs). However, grand challenges remain regarding the observation, modeling, and management of CZs and watershed systems. We synthesize the progress and breakthroughs associated with watershed science and CZ research in the Hei...

Global river systems are experiencing rapid changes in sediment transport under growing anthropogenic and climatic stresses. However, the response of sediment discharge to the coupled influence of anthropogenic and natural factors and the associated impacts on the fluvial geomorphology in the Yangtze and Mekong rivers are not comprehensively assess...

Terrestrial export of nitrogen is a critical Earth system process, but its global dynamics remain difficult to predict at a high spatiotemporal resolution. Here, we use deep learning (DL) to model daily riverine nitrogen export in response to hydrometeorological and anthropogenic drivers. Long short-term memory (LSTM) models for the daily concentra...

Lake ice loss has been detected worldwide due to recent climate warming, yet spatially and temporally detailed information on the changes inglobal ice phenology does not exist. Here, we build a global lake ice phenologydatabase comprising three lake ice phenologies –freeze-up, break-up, and ice duration –for each year acrosstwocenturies (1900-2099)...

Mitigating livestock-related nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions is key for China to meet its 2060 carbon neutrality target. Here we present a comprehensive analysis of the magnitude, spatiotemporal variation and drivers of Chinese livestock N2O emissions from 1978 to 2017. We developed scenarios to explore emissions mitigation potential and associated m...

Parabens are widely added to food, cosmetics, and medicines as preservatives and are typical contaminants of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs). However, their fate and transport in urban watersheds remain largely unexplored. This study investigated the role of road runoff as a critical nonpoint source of parabens and their metaboli...

Flooding in the Yangtze River Basin could severely damage socio-economic development, river ecosystems, food security, hydropower production and transportation in China. The Yangtze River Basin accounts for approximately 30% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) and is an engine for the country’s rapid economic growth. One commonly held belief is...

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...

It is imperative to understand the interconnectedness of water use and hydrological impacts for water policy design underlying varying hydrological conditions across space and over time. However, such analysis remains difficult, constrained by the lack of appropriate modeling tools that fully integrate water policies, water use, and hydrological pr...

Sustainable stormwater management benefits a lot from low impact development (LID). The early-stage design of LID layout is of critical for LID practices. However, the technology gaps still exist for an accurate, flexible, systematic solution of optimal design. Literatures usually only consider the size and number of LID facilities in a given scena...

Long short‐term memory (LSTM) networks represent one of the most prevalent deep learning (DL) architectures in current hydrological modeling, but they remain black boxes from which process understanding can hardly be obtained. This study aims to demonstrate the potential of interpretive DL in gaining scientific insights using flood prediction acros...

The encapsulation of specific management measurements and computing services is rarely reported for surface water EDSS. To promote the efficiency and reduce the complexity of surface water EDSS development, a generic pathway to encapsulate the surface water quality model and its applications as cloud computing services is proposed. The web service...

This study focuses on the evolution of flood risk in the Yangtze River Basin under climate change, which is a critical issue for socioeconomic development in future. In this study, we 1) compared the 1998 and 2020 floods and found that the destructiveness of a given discharge is now greater than before; 2) revealed three issues related to the above...

Widespread water losses in endorheic river basins have triggered ecological disasters. Agricultural irrigation has been one of the major drivers of water losses. It is imperative to address the water conflict between agriculture and ecosystems in arid regions, but significant gaps remain in knowledge of the water-agriculture-ecosystem nexus. The He...

Cities are not only major contributors to global climate change but also stand at the forefront of climate change impact. Quantifying and assessing the risk potentially induced by climate change has great significance for cities to undertake positive climate adaptation and risk prevention. However, most of the previous studies focus on global, nati...

More than 50% of global lakes periodically freeze, and their lake ice phenology is sensitive to climate change. However, spatially detailed quantification of the changes in lake ice at the global scale is not available. Here, we map ice cover in >33,000 lakes throughout the North Temperate Zone (23.5-66.5°N) using 0.55 million Landsat images from 1...

Water resources in good quality guarantee the primary condition for the maintenance and development of the natural ecosystem and human society. Water quality status and health risk of the lake water bodies in the national nature reserve, the Yamdrok-tso basin, in the southern Tibetan Plateau are assessed by 25 water parameters including 12 heavy me...

Surface water (SW) and groundwater (GW) samples were taken from Xiong'an New Area and the vicinity of Baoding in June 2019. Concentrations of seven parabens were determined for these samples and the associated ecological risk was assessed. The detection rates of MeP and PrP were 100%. MeP was found to be the predominant compound in SW samples, with...

Watershed system models are important tools for understanding complex watershed systems and integrated river basin management. However, there are very few models that can represent the coevolution of water, ecology and socioeconomic system at the river basin scale. In this study, a watershed system model was developed using the case of the Heihe Ri...

It remains a great challenge to represent field-scale (e.g., meters to tens of meters) heterogeneity in the ecohydrological modeling of large river basins due to the tradeoff between spatial resolution and computational cost. This study improved an existing ecohydrological model, HEIFLOW, by introducing the subgrid structure of land cover, multilay...

The recent Sponge City Development (SCD) policy enacted in China has attracted tremendous investment, although its role in tackling water pollution remains vague. This study investigated the impact of SCD in Shenzhen, a national pilot city for SCD, on water quality in the transjurisdictional bay between Shenzhen and Hong Kong. A system modeling app...

Bisphenol A (BPA) analogues, used in a range of products due to health concerns regarding BPA, have emerged as ubiquitous environmental contaminants worldwide. This study aims to evaluate the levels of nine bisphenols (BPs) and eight biomarkers (malondialdehyde, MDA; 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanosine, 8-OHdG; estradiol, E2; follicle-stimulating hormone,...

Parabens are preservatives widely used in pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs). This study investigated urban water pollution by parabens from a watershed perspective. Water and sediment samples were collected from one of the most polluted urban streams in China. Six parabens and five paraben metabolites were frequently detected in the...

Modeling agriculture-impacted hydrological processes remains a challenge, as information on irrigation activities is often insufficient. This study developed modules for emulating high-resolution irrigation activities and representing water management policies in integrated hydrologic modeling. The new modeling approach was implemented in China's s...

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 potential use of environmental magnetism to investigate heavy metal pollution was investigated by analyzing sediment samples from a short sediment core (Z07) from the Yellow River Estuary. The heavy metal concentrations and speciation, grain sizes, and magnetic properties were determined, and correlations between the parameters were identified....

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...

Bisphenol AF (BPAF), an alternative to bisphenol A, is widely detected in aquatic environments. Owing to health concerns, the toxic effects of BPAF on organisms are drawing attention. The present study aims to evaluate the toxicity of BPAF, combining the results of omics techniques and experiment. Employing transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq), we ob...

Different roof materials are deployed for mitigating the urban heat, which significantly affects our life. However, the answer to the question of which roof material has the best cooling performance in urban areas remains uncertain. We need to compare different roof materials together under a certain climate condition to find geographically appropr...

Analyzing river basins as coupled human and hydrological systems is important to advance our understanding of hydrological processes, and to provide insights into policy design for water resources management. However, assessing spatially heterogeneous and temporally dynamic characteristics of human-hydrological interactions remains a challenge, and...

Human activities have largely modified nitrogen (N) sources supply, cycling and export from land to ocean. Nitrification and denitrification are vital processes alleviating N pollution in aquatic ecosystems but the diverse responses and niche of microbial N retention to human disturbance are still understudied. Here we investigated the changes in N...

Due to overuse, misuse, and poor absorption during treatment, antibiotics are consistently released into the environment, raising concerns about their impacts on ecological sustainability and health. In this study we performed transcriptome profiling to assess potential reproductive effects of an antibiotic mixture in gravid female zebrafish. Gravi...

Systemic analysis of hydrology and water quality fluctuations using a data-intensive approach is an emerging research area and is significant for understanding hydrological processes. However, there is very limited understanding of the high-frequency characteristics of water quality fluctuations in the frequency domain. This study proposes a generi...

Water resource assessment is crucial for human well-being and ecosystem health. Assessments considering both blue and green water are of great significance, as green water plays a critical but often ignored role in the terrestrial ecosystem, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. Many approaches have been developed for green and blue water valua...

Effects of agricultural activities on temporal variations in streamflow were investigated based on an integrated hydrological model in the Heihe River Basin (HRB). De-trended fluctuation analysis was conducted using the simulated time series of the daily streamflow at 13 observation points along the Heihe River. Both the original and deseasonalized...

Effects of agricultural activities on temporal variations in streamflow were investigated based on an integrated hydrological model in the Heihe River Basin (HRB). De-trended fluctuation analysis was conducted using the simulated time series of the daily streamflow at 13 observation points along the Heihe River. Both the original and deseasonalized...

Colloid contaminants are widely distributed in surface runoff from crop land and can be effectively removed by vegetative filter strips (VFS), whose quantification however proves difficult. Standard mechanism-based models contain many unknown parameters with intrinsic uncertainty, limiting their applicability and potential extension for other envir...

“Opportunistic sensing” represents an appealing idea for collecting unconventional data with broad spatial coverage and high resolution, but few studies have explored its feasibility in hydrology. This study develops a novel approach to measuring rainfall intensity in real-world conditions based on videos acquired by ordinary surveillance cameras....

There is a large amount of studies surrounding the usage of agro-industrial waste (AIW) for the adsorptions of organic pollutants (dyes) and inorganic pollutants (heavy metals) in water/wastewater. This method is normally treated as an alternative approach to the conventional water/wastewater treatment. However, there are some increasing interests...

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...

Integrated surface water–groundwater (SW–GW) models could be used to assess the impacts of climate change or variability on the hydrological cycle. However, the damping effects of the hydrological system have rarely been explored via integrated SW–GW modeling. This paper presents an integrated modeling study in a typical humid area, the Miho catchm...

This study developed a comprehensive graphical data processing and modeling system named Visual HEIFLOW (VHF) for integrated surface water-groundwater modeling. Its distinctive features include the following. First, VHF uses a generic multivariable-space-time data cube model, which enables the system to efficiently handle large time-series datasets...

In arid and semiarid areas, the issues of water security, ecological security, and food security are tightly interlinked. Understanding the water-ecosystem-agriculture (WEA) nexus in such areas is critical to their sustainable development. This study presents a basin-scale integrated ecohydrological model and a paradigm for analyzing the WEA nexus...

Identifying source information after river chemical spill occurrences is critical for emergency responses. However, the inverse uncertainty characteristics of this kind of pollution source inversion problem have not yet been clearly elucidated. To fill this gap, stochastic analysis approaches, including a regional sensitivity analysis method, ident...

In this work, the photolysis of enrofloxacin (ENR), pefloxacin (PEF), and sulfaquinoxaline (SQX) in aqueous solution by UV combined with H2O2 or ferrous ions (Fe(II)), as well as Fenton (Fe(II)/H2O2) processes, was investigated. In addition, the toxicity of the final reaction solution after UV/H2O2/Fe(II) treatment toward zebrafish embryos was dete...

This study develops a novel approach to data-driven hydrological modeling. The approach adopts the feature representation technique in computer vision to effectively exploit spatial information contained in time-variant input data fields and seamlessly fuse multisource information via machine learning. The new approach overcomes a major limitation...

At the basin scale, the operation of surface water reservoirs rarely takes groundwater aquifers into consideration, which can also be regarded as reservoirs underground. This study investigates the impact of reservoir operation on the water cycle and evaluates the effect of the joint operation of surface water and groundwater reservoirs on the wate...

Key Points Shallow groundwater (<10 m deep) of alluvial plain responds to land surface regimes and dominates seasonal water budget variations Groundwater system in mountainous upstream impacts the evapotranspiration and surface‐groundwater interactions in alluvial plain downstream Groundwater sustains ecosystem by contributing to evapotranspiration...

Water resources assessment is crucial for human well-being and ecosystem’s health. Assessments by considering both the blue and green water are of great significance as the green water plays a critical but often ignored role in the terrestrial ecosystem, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. Many approaches have been developed for green and blu...

Field monitoring strategy is critical for disaster preparedness and watershed emergency environmental management. However, development of such is also highly challenging. Despite the efforts and progress thus far, no definitive guidelines or solutions are available worldwide for quantitatively designing a monitoring network in response to river che...

Endorheic basins around the world are suffering from water and ecosystem crisis. To pursue sustainable development, quantifying the hydrological cycle is fundamentally important. However, knowledge gaps exist in how climate change and human activities influence the hydrological cycle in endorheic basins. We used an integrated eco-hydrological model...

Water resources in coastal areas can be profoundly influenced by both climate change and human activities. These climatic and human impacts are usually intertwined and difficult to isolate. This study developed an integrated model-based approach for detection and attribution of climatic and human impacts and applied this approach to the Luanhe Plai...

Bisphenol S (BPS) and bisphenol F (BPF) have been increasingly used as alternatives to bisphenol A (BPA) owing to health concerns. The present study aims to evaluate the impact of these two BPA analogs on oxidative stress and the immune system during zebrafish embryonic and larval development. Environmentally relevant levels of BPS and BPF exposure...

Surface waters exhibit regionalization due to various climatic conditions and anthropogenic activities. Here we assess the impact of topographic and socio-economic factors on the climate sensitivity of surface water quality, estimated using an elasticity approach (climate elasticity of water quality (CEWQ)), and identify potential risks of instabil...

Groundwater chemistry data are normally scarce in remote inland areas. Effective statistical approaches are highly desired to extract important information about hydrochemical processes from the limited data. This study applied a clustering approach based on the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to a hydrochemical dataset of groundwater collected in the...

Mountainous areas are referred to as “water towers” since they are the source of water for many low-lying communities. The hydrologic budgets of these areas, which are particularly susceptible to climate change, are typically poorly constrained. To address this, we analyzed the partitioning between baseflow and mountain block recharge (MBR) using a...

Phreatophytes play an important role in maintaining the ecological services in arid and semi-arid areas. Characterizing the interaction between groundwater and phreatophytes is critical for the land and water management in such areas but has rarely been attempted via integrated ecohydrological modeling. In this study, a plant growth model was devel...

To improve its air quality, Beijing, the capital of China, has implemented high-cost pollution control measures mainly focused on shifting its energy mix. However, the effectiveness of these measures has long been questioned, especially given the recent problem of severe haze. The main study objectives are to achieve independent, although indirect,...

Physically-based, fully integrated surface water (SW)-groundwater (GW) models have been increasingly used in water resources research and management. The integrated modeling involves a large amount of scientific data. The use of three-dimensional (3D) visualization software to integrate all the scientific data into a comprehensive system can facili...

Watershed-scale water quality (WWQ) models are now widely used to support management decision-making. However, significant uncertainty in the model outputs remains a largely unaddressed issue. In recent years, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), a category of formal Bayesian approaches for uncertainty analysis (UA), has become popular in the field of...