The method of surface modeling of land cover scenarios (SMLCS) has been improved to simulate the scenarios of land cover in the karst areas of southwestern China. On the basis of the observation monthly climatic data collected from 782 weather stations of China during the period from 1981 to…

Dramatic land use change is expected to take place in China in the coming decades, which will exert great impact on the vegetation biomass. The paper assesses how land use change will influence the size and spatial distribution of the vegetation biomass in China. A spatially explicit land use…

Soil and water conservation measures including terracing, afforestation, construction of sediment‐trapping dams, and the ‘Grain for Green Program’ have been extensively implemented in the Yanhe River watershed, of the Loess Plateau, China, over the last six decades, and have resulted in large‐…

Knowledge of soil organic matter (SOM) dynamics following deforestation or reforestation is essential for evaluating carbon (C) budgets and cycle at regional or global scales. Worldwide land‐use changes involving conversion of vegetation with different photosynthetic pathways (e.g. C₃ and C₄)…

Hainan, the largest tropical island in China, belongs to the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot. The Changhua watershed is a center of endemism for plants and birds and the cradle of Hainan’s main rivers. However, this area has experienced recent and ongoing deforestation and habitat fragmentation…

Urbanization is the most typical form of land use/cover change, and exploration of the driving mechanism of urban growth and the prediction of its future changes are very important for achieving urban sustainable development. In view of the ability of a multi-agent system to simulate a complex…

Sixteen organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) were investigated in the 80 agricultural topsoil samples of Three Gorges Dam region, China. The concentration of OCPs ranged from 1.26 to 22.15 ng g⁻¹, with a mean concentration 6.49 ng g⁻¹. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes (DDTs) and…

Regional climate is influenced by land surface processes through energy exchange between land and atmosphere at various scales. The performance of climate model simulation is largely influenced by land cover parameterization, especially over areas that experience rapid change of land surface…

Governance plays a key role in rangeland management. In China, all rangeland, including pastoral land and agro-pastoral land, is owned by the State. Since 1980, use rights have been granted to households by the Chinese government extending the household contract responsibility system (HCRS). But…

The Ebinur Lake is a closed inland lake located within the arid region of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the northwestern part of China, near the Kazakhstan border. The shrinkage of the lake area is believed to be caused by ecological environmental deterioration and has become an important…

In China, three major rangeland management policies have caused dramatic social, economic, and ecological changes for pastoral regions in the past 30 yr: the Rangeland Household Contract Policy (RHCP), Rangeland Ecological Construction Projects (RECPs), and the Nomad Settlement Policy (NSP). The…

Progress in combating aeolian desertification (land degradation resulting from wind erosion) has been achieved in an agro‐pastoral ecotone of northern China since the mid‐1980s. This paper reviews three common measures used to combat and control aeolian desertification in such regions. In…