As a matter of expediency, most existing corporate-based urban networks can only be quantitatively measured by either counting the number of linkages or calculating the product of estimated service values. However, the impreciseness arising due to the limits of quantitative analysis may prove fatal to studies about non-market economies like China. Employing the capital investment dataset as an example

To determine the pollution levels and potential toxic risks of arsenic (As) and heavy metals (Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, Pb and Cd) in water and suspended particulate matter (SPM) in tail reaches (including freshwater reach and low-salinity reach) of the Yellow River as the Flow-Sediment Regulation Project (FSRP) has been carried out for approximately 15 yr, the surface water and SPM were sampled at pre-flood

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), there has been a proliferation of urban studies using big data. Yet, another type of urban research innovations that involve interdisciplinary thinking and methods remains underdeveloped. This paper represents an attempt to adopt a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) toolbox developed in Computer Science for the analysis of eye movement patterns in Psychology

Detailed information on the spatio-temporal changes of cropland soil organic carbon (SOC) can significantly contribute to the improvement of soil fertility and mitigate climate change. Nonetheless, information and knowledge on the national scale spatio-temporal changes and the corresponding uncertainties of SOC in Chinese upland soils remain limited. The CENTURY model was used to estimate the SOC storages

From 28 March to 17 April, 2018, different forms of mercury (Hg) in the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea were measured to study the influencing factors on the distribution and transformation of Hg in spring using a shared cruise. The mean concentration of dissolved gaseous mercury (DGM) in the surface water of the Yellow and Bohai Seas was (44.3 ± 43.9) pg/L, which was close to that in mid-latitude oceans

China has experienced rapid urbanizations with dramatic land cover changes since 1978. Forest loss is one of land cover changes, and it induces various eco-environmental degradation issues. As one of China’s hotspot regions, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) has undergone a dramatic urban expansion. To better understand forest dynamics and protect forest ecosystem, revealing the

A comprehensive understanding of the spatial interaction between the industrial undertaking capability and the position of the global value chain of the 12 East Asian countries is conducive to strengthening regional cooperation, gaining a say in foreign trade and becoming the dominant player in the global division of labor system. The article reveals the operating rules of the interaction between the

Characterizing the availability of opportunities to residents has been a long-term aim in health care geographic investigation. It is important to measure the degree of inequity in health care accessibility and to identify underserved areas, due to the uneven distribution of health care services. In this study, JavaScript was used to calculate travel time based on Amap, as this can provide a more reliable

Delineating life circles is an essential prerequisite for urban community life circle planning. Recent studies combined the environmental contexts with residents’ global positioning system (GPS) data to delineate the life circles. This method, however, is constrained by GPS data, and it can only be applied in the GPS surveyed communities. To address this limitation, this study developed a generalizable

Promoting the sustainable intensification of cultivated land use (SICL) has become crucial for ensuring a sufficient supply of grain and important agricultural products, as well as for the sustainable use of resources. Taking widely used areas of Shandong Province in China as examples, an analytical scale and level framework for SICL is constructed in this study. It measures the level of SICL through

Land use changes have significant impacts on the carbon balance in an urban ecosystem. When there is rapid development in urbanizing regions, land use changes have a dramatic effect on vegetation carbon storage (VCS). This study investigates the impact of land use change on VCS in a period of rapid urbanization in Hangzhou, China. The results show that: 1) from 2000 to 2015, land use in Hangzhou underwent

Hydrological connectivity has significant effects on the functions of estuarine wetland ecosystem. This study aimed to examine the dynamics of hydrological connectivity and its impact on soil carbon pool in the Yellow River Delta, China. We calculated the hydrological connectivity based on the hydraulic resistance and graph theory, and measured soil total carbon and organic carbon under four different

Based on the adaptive analysis paradigm, this paper constructs an evaluation index system and an evaluation model of the level of industrial ecology of a restricted development zone from the perspective of the industrial system and of the environmental system, and studies the spatial-temporal differentiation characteristics and the driving factors of the level of industrial ecology of the restricted

China has started shifting from relying on supply management to demand management strategy in addressing its water shortage problems. Water option, a financial derivative for water commodity, has been utilized to manage water demands in the United States and Europe since the 1990s but is still novel to China. In this study we analyzed the pros and cons of China’s existing system for water rights transfers

Land desertification and aeolian activity are currently the greatest threats to alpine ecological environments and are also the primary challenges of desertification control and ecological restoration projects. Afforestation of sandy lands around the Qinghai Lake in China has effectively controlled the desertification of this watershed. However, certain issues remain which challenge its overall success

Based on urban physical space and theory of landscape ecology, a triune assessment framework —‘size-density-morphology’—was constructed in order to analyze the spatial pattern and the scale effect of urban resilience in Shenyang of China in 2015, and to explore the main impact factors of landscape under different spatial scale backgrounds. The results show that: 1) Urban resilience is an optimal combination

Heat flux is important for studying interactions between atmosphere and lake. The heat exchange between air-water interfaces is one of the important ways to govern the temperature of the water surface. Heat exchange between the air-water interfaces and the surrounding environment is completed by solar radiation, conduction, and evaporation, and all these processes mainly occur at the air-water interface

Scientific collaboration has become an important part of the people-to-people exchanges in the Belt and Road initiative, and remarkable progress has been made since 2013. Taking the 65 countries along the Belt and Road (BRI countries) as the research areas and using collaborated Web of Science (WOS) core collection papers to construct an international scientific collaboration matrix, the paper explores

There are many problems, such as poverty, unemployment, poor infrastructure and how to improve the ecological environment, in the shantytowns of old industrial cities. Shantytowns are the most centralized areas with different contradictions, referred to as the ‘problem areas’ of urban sustainable development. The shantytown transformation of old industrial cities is a typical process of unit community

The Mongolian Plateau is one of the regions most sensitive to climate change, the more obvious increase of temperature in 21st century here has been considered as one of the important causes of drought and desertification. It is very important to understand the multi-year variation and occurrence characteristics of drought in the Mongolian Plateau to explore the ecological environment and the response

Understanding the spatiotemporal patterns of three-dimensional urban forms, especially building height, can have important implications for improving urban air quality and mitigating the urban heat island effect by optimizing urban planning and management policies. This study investigated building height evolution and its influencing factors over approximately half a century (1960–2017) in Guangzhou

More and more ports appeared along China’s coastline, which destroyed natural coastline and coastal landscape. Some of them are inefficiency operations. It is important to evaluate operational efficiency of ports to reveal their position in regional competitive environment. In this study, high spatial resolution satellite remote sensing images were used to monitor ship number and plane area. The port-use

Domestic burning emits large amounts of pollutants into the ambient air due to incomplete and inefficient combustion, with significant impacts on indoor air quality and human health. Northeast China is one of the major contributors to domestic burning emissions in China; however, the high-resolution emissions inventories of domestic biomass and coal burning in Northeast China are lacked, which are

Soil carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentrations and stoichiometries can be used to evaluate the success indicators to the effects of wetland restoration and reflect ecosystem function. Restoration of inland soda saline-alkali wetlands is widespread, however, the soil nutrition changes that follow restoration are unclear. We quantified the recovery trajectories of soil physicochemical

The connectedness between cities has become one of the most widely discussed topics in urban and regional research in the mobile and big data era. One problem identified is the asymmetric city connectivity, partially due to data availability. We present a data-driven approach based on location and toponym (place name) extracted from social media data, to assess the asymmetric connectivity between cities

The north-south transitional zone in China mainly consists of the Qinling-Daba Mountains. It is the most important West-East geo-ecological space in China, containing protected areas vital for biodiversity conservation and ecological security of China. The protection and rational development of its natural habitat is of great significance to China’s ecological security and integration of protected

Understanding the dynamics of urbanization is essential to the sustainable development of cities. Meanwhile the analysis of urban development can also provide scientifically and effective information for decision-making. With the long-term Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) nighttime light images, a pixel level assessment of urbanization of China from

The housing vacancy rate (HVR) is an important index in assessing the healthiness of residential real estate market. In China, it is hardly to take advantage of the basic data of real estate information due to the opaque of those data. In this paper, the HVR is estimated to two scales. At the grid level, urban area ratio was calculated by nighttime images after eliminating outliers of nighttime images

As a key parameter for indicating the fraction of surface-reflected solar incident radiation, land surface albedo plays an important role in the Earth’s surface energy budget (SEB). Since the Sanjiang Plain has been severely affected by human activities (e.g., reclamation and shrinking of wetlands), it is important to assess the spatiotemporal variations of surface albedo in this region using a long-term

Measuring the economic and social effects of the Northeast China Revitalization Strategy is critical to addressing regional sustainable development in China. To shed light on this issue, an integrated perspective was adopted that is combined with the difference-in-differences method to measure the effects of the strategy on economic growth and social development in Northeast China. The findings suggest

Rapid urbanization has triggered large rural population floating into cities, which in turn affects rural human-land relationships. The actual human-land relationship involves the coupling level of a time point and dynamic change of a time interval. However, few studies have identified the rural human-land relationship from these two perspectives. This study combined static coupling analysis with a

Although the factors affecting rural-to-urban migration have been discussed and analyzed in detail, few studies have examined the spatiotemporal dynamic characteristics of rural migrants’ employment and working-cities in the post-immigrate era, which is essential for the citizenization and social integration of new-type urbanization in China. This study uses survey data from rural migration laborers

Land surface hydrothermal conditions (LSHCs) reflect land surface moisture and heat conditions, and play an important role in energy and water cycles in soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Based on comparison of four evaluation methods (namely, the classic statistical method, geostatistical method, information theory method, and fractal method), this study proposed a new scheme for evaluating the spatial

In the 21st century, economic interdependence between countries has gradually become an important source of state power. Globalization and the rise of China’s economy have had a significant impact on other economies around the world. China’s economic influence is becoming more and more important. On the basis of the sensitivity dependence and vulnerability dependence of asymmetric interdependence theory

Ecological security is the foundation and guarantee of sustainable development, and its importance is increasingly widely recognized and valued by the world. The Yangtze River Basin is an important ecological security barrier in China and the Wanjiang City Belt (WCB) along the Yangtze River is directly related to the ecological security pattern of the entire basin. Based on the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response

Mobile information and communication technologies (MICTs) have fully penetrated everyday life in smart societies; this has greatly compressed time, space, and distance, and consequently, reshaped residents’ travel behaviour patterns. As a new mode of shared mobility, the sharing bicycle offers a variety of options for the daily travel of urban residents. Extant studies have mainly examined the travel

Accurate estimations of evapotranspiration (ET) are essential for understanding land-atmosphere coupling and atmosphere-underlying surface energy and water vapor exchanges. Based on input data processing, this paper simulates the temporal and spatial variation of ET in the Dajiuhu Basin from 1990 to 2018 using the BEPS-TerrainLab V2.0 model. Compared with the ET measured by an eddy covariance (EC)

The rapid development of China’s economy and urbanization has given rise to noticeable environmental problems, among which the change of air quality has received extensive attention. The panel data of PM2.5 (particles with an aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 µm or less) in 343 prefecture-level cities in China from 1998 to 2016 were statistically analyzed to reveal the characteristics of the temporal evolution

The core issue of sustainable development refers to the coordinated development of economic-social-environmental issues. In the present study, by complying with the China Sustainable Development Indicator System (CSDIS) concept, a comprehensive index system was built; besides, Natural Breaks (Jenks) Classification Method, Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis and Geographic Detector Analysis were conducted

Urban agglomeration is the main spatial organization mode used by the Chinese government to promote the policy of new urbanization strategy. Hence, a better understanding of the urban growth boundary (UGB) has profound theoretical and practical significance regarding sustainable urban development. This study devised a raster-based land use spatial optimization (LUSO) framework, and utilized ant colony

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 ecosystem health data. This study aims to understand

Understanding the spatial patterns of land-use and land-cover (LULC) and their driving forces in transnational areas is important for the sustainable development of these regions. However, the spatial patterns of LULC and their driving forces across multiple scales are poorly understood in transnational areas. In this study, we analyzed the spatial patterns of LULC and driving forces in the transnational

Promoting women’s employment is not only the need of social and economic development, but also the historical mission of liberating women. This paper uses data from the 1% Population Sample Survey, taken in Guangdong Province in 2015, to explore how women’s marital status, education, and family environment affect the female non-agricultural employment rate (FNAER) on a county scale using a spatial-lag

Grassland fires results in carbon emissions, which directly affects the carbon cycle of ecosystems and the carbon balance. The grassland area of Inner Mongolia accounts for 22% of the total grassland area in China, and many fires occur in the area every year. However, there are few models for estimation of carbon emissions from grassland fires. Accurate estimation of direct carbon emissions from grassland

This study aims to verify the concept of niches at multiple spatial scales in plant communities. To this end, we analyzed the niche characteristic of Rhododendron dauricum plant communities in Northeast China at three spatial scales. At the local scale, we calculated the Importance Value (IV) of species in five communities in the north of the Da Hinggan Mountains. At the intermediate scale, we examined

Frozen ground degradation under a warming climate profoundly influences the growth of alpine vegetation in the source region of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. This study investigated spatiotemporal variations in the frozen ground distribution, the active layer thickness (ALT) of permafrost (PF) soil and the soil freeze depth (SFD) in seasonally frozen soil from 1980 to 2018 using the temperature at the

Green development is an important issue of sustainable development in China. Due to the relatively backward economy and the fragile ecological environment, restricted development zones need to embrace green development. Taking 38 counties in Jilin Province as the empirical research objects, and based on cross-sectional data for each county in 2005, 2010, and 2015, we accurately depicted the spatiotemporal

China is experiencing conflicts between its large population and scarce arable land, and between a demand for high productivity and the severe soil erosion of arable land. Since 1949, China has committed to soil and water conservation (SWC), for which eight regions and 41 subregions have been developed to improve the environment and increase land productivity. To obtain information from the regional

The objective of this study is to develop a framework for re-examining and re-defining the classical concepts of spatial interaction and reorganization in the urban system. We introduce a modified radiation model for spatial interactions, coupled with migration big data, transport accessibility algorithm, and city competitiveness assessment for efficient distribution of the inter-city flow through

This study attempts to evaluate the rationality of the spatial layout of shopping malls and identify the urban area with poor shopping mall accessibility, as well as to provide a reference and assist decision-making for planning. Using the case of Nanjing, China, this study developed a method to evaluate the accessibility of shopping malls by three transport modes (car traffic, public transit, and

In this study, using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite images and environmental satellite CCD images, the spatio-temporal distribution of Ulva prolifera in the southern Yellow Sea during the period of 2011–2018 was extracted and combined with MODIS Level3 Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) product data and Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Sea Surface Temperature

The increasing availability of data in the urban context (e.g., mobile phone, smart card and social media data) allows us to study urban dynamics at much finer temporal resolutions (e.g., diurnal urban dynamics). Mobile phone data, for instance, are found to be a useful data source for extracting diurnal human mobility patterns and for understanding urban dynamics. While previous studies often use

This study designed an approach to derive land-cover in the South Africa with insufficient ground samples, and made a case demonstration in Nzhelele and Levhuvu catchments, South Africa. The method was developed based on an integration of Landsat 8, Sentinel-1, and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. Random forest classifier

Precipitation plays an important role in the water supplies that support ecological restoration by sustaining large-scale artificial plantations in arid and semiarid regions, especially black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) plantations (RP plantations), which are widely planted due to R. pseudoacacia being an excellent pioneer species. Characterizing the response of soil moisture to rainfall events at

Nowadays, urban transit system has become one of the major forces underlying urban pace transformation via changing accessibility of related land parcels, which leads to the changes of land value and land use structure. This paper studied the interaction between land use changes and related transport routes, particular about how different transport routes and road nodes influence the conversion of

Cold storage is the vital infrastructure of cold chain logistics. In this study, we analyzed the spatial pattern evolution characteristics, spatial autocorrelation and influencing factors of cold storage in China by using kernel density estimation (KDE), spatial autocorrelation analysis (SAA), and spatial error model (SEM). Results showed that: 1) the spatial distribution of cold storage in China is

Global numerous wetlands are the most productive ecosystem and have high carbon sequestration potential to mitigate increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. However, few are available on estimating average carbon sequestration rates by global wetlands (Carbonsq) at century timescale. In this article, Carbonsq data of 473 wetland soil/sediment cores from the literatures were collected in detail by the meta-analysis

Income inequality in urban China has attracted growing attention from China’s urban researchers and policy makers. Whereas many studies have interrogated the pattern and process of the income gap in Chinese cities undergoing the institutional transformation from plan to market, relatively little is known about how such unequal distribution of income is related to China’s ongoing structural transformation

Vegetation maps are fundamental for regional-scale ecological research. However, information is often not sufficiently up to date for such research. The Loess Plateau is a key area for vegetation restoration projects and a suitable area for regional ecological research. To carry out regional vegetation mapping based on the principles of hierarchical classification, object-oriented methods, visual interpretation

Improving comprehensive agricultural productivity is an important measure to realize agricultural modernization. Based on the data from Jilin Statistical Yearbook, this study analyzed the spatial and temporal characteristics of comprehensive agricultural productivity discrepancy in the main agricultural production areas of Jilin Province, China. The comprehensive agricultural productivity of 25 county-level