Preface

Humanity turns to a new chapter in 2022. As proud as we are of rapid developments in economics, science, and technology, we are equally concerned about such global issues as biodiversity conservation and the global pandemic of Covid-19. The unprecedented impact human activities have exerted on the global climate system is clearly underscored by the data from the World Meteorological Organization: The previous fifty years since 1970 have been the warmest of the past 2000 years.     

Climate change and multi-dimensional sustainable urbanization

Global large-scale urbanization and climate change have become indisputable scientific facts yet are unresolved issues, and are a common concern for mankind. The relationship between these two topics is unclear and it is not known how to deal appropriately at the scientific level with climate change in the process of urbanization. Further exploration of the science, management and practice, are needed to achieve global and regional sustainadevelopment. This paper first considers the basic facts concerning mass urbanization and climate change and summarizes the interactions and possible mechanisms of urbanization and climate change. Urbanization leads to the heat island effect, an uneven distribution of precipitation and extreme weather, together with a local-regional-global multi-scale superposition effect, which aggravates the consequences of global climate change. The impact of climate change on urbanization is mainly manifested in aspects such as changes of energy consumption, mortality, and the spread of infectious diseases, sea level rise, extreme weather damage to infrastructure, and water shortages. This paper also briefly reviews relevant international research programs and action coalitions and puts forward an analysis framework multi-dimensional sustainable urbanization which can adapt to and mitigate climate change, from the perspective of the four key dimensions—population, land use, economy, and society. It is imperative that we strengthen the interdisciplinary activities involving the natural and social sciences, take urbanization and other human activities into consideration of the land-atmosphere system, and explore the human-land-atmosphere coupling process. The adaptation and mitigation from the perspective of human activities, as represented by urbanization, might be the most critical and realistic way to deal with climate change.     

基于水环境约束分区的产业布局引导研究——以江苏省为例(英文)

Along with the highly speedy development of economy and society in the developed area in China,with the sharp increase in the quantity of pollutant discharge such as agricultural fertilizers,industrial wastewater and domestic sewage,the water environment has been deteriorated continuously and then become a restricting factor to regional development.For harmonizing the relationship between economic development and water environment,many countries have been attempting water environmental function zoning so as to provide a scientific basis for the basin management.However,focusing mainly on water body,these researches ignored the spatial relation between water and land as well as the restricted function of water environment on regional industrial layout.So previous index system adapted only to the environmental genes but excluded the stress genes of socio-economic development.This paper,thus,taking both the sensitivity and pressure of water environment into consideration,discusses the methods of constraint regionalization of water environment,including how to divide the assessed units,choose and manage the assessed elements.Then,as a case study,Jiangsu Province is divided into four types of areas by the method of quadrant analysis,i.e.,high-pressure and high-sensitivity area (HP-HS Area),high-pressure and low-sensitivity area (HP-LS Area),low-pressure and high-sensitivity area (LP-HS Area) and low-pressure and low-sensitivity area (LP-LS Area).Finally,this paper presents the schemes of industrial layout and the policy of industrial development direction respectively,which are very important bases for harmonizing the industrial development and the bearing capacity of water environment.     

全球粮食安全格局的时空演化

Food security is the primary prerequisite for achieving other Millennium Development Goals(MDGs).Given that the MDG of“halving the proportion of hungers by 2015”was not realized as scheduled,it will be more pressing and challenging to reach the goal of zero hunger by 2030.So there is high urgency to find the pattern and mechanism of global food security from the perspective of spatio-temporal evolution.In this paper,based on the analysis of database by using a multi-index evaluation method and radar map area model,the global food security level for 172 countries from 2000 to 2014 were assessed;and then spatial autocorrelation analysis was conducted to depict the spatial patterns and changing characteristics of global food security;then,multi-nonlinear regression methods were employed to identify the factors affecting the food security patterns.The results show:1)The global food security pattern can be summarized as“high-high aggregation,low-low aggregation”.The most secure countries are mainly distributed in Western Europe,North America,Oceania and parts of East Asia.The least secure countries are mainly distributed in sub-Saharan Africa,South Asia and West Asia,and parts of Southeast Asia.2)Europe and sub-Saharan Africa are hot and cold spots of the global food security pattern respectively,while in non-aggregation areas,Haiti,North Korea,Tajikistan and Afghanistan have long-historical food insecurity problems.3)The pattern of global food security is generally stable,but the internal fluctuations in the extremely insecure groups were significant.The countries with the highest food insecurity are also the countries with the most fluctuated levels of food security.4)The annual average temperature,per capita GDP,proportion of people accessible to clean water,political stability and non-violence levels are the main factors influencing the global food security pattern.Research shows that the status of global food security has improved since the year 2000,yet there are still many challenges such as unstable global food security and acute regional food security issues.It will be difficult to understand these differences from a single factor,especially the annual average temperature and annual precipitation.The abnormal performance of the above factors indicates that appropriate natural conditions alone do not absolutely guarantee food security,while the levels of agricultural development,the purchasing power of residents,regional accessibility,as well as political and economic stability have more direct influence.     

山区冰雪变化及其对区域水资源的影响（英文）

Glaciers and snow are major constituents of solid water bodies in mountains; they can regulate the stability of local water sources. However, they are strongly affected by climate change. This study focused on the Tianshan Mountains, using glacier and snow datasets to analyse variations in glaciers, snow, water storage, and runoff. Three typical river basins(Aksu, Kaidou, and Urumqi Rivers) were selected to interpret the impacts of glacier and snow changes on regional water resources in the Tianshan Mountains. The results exhibited a nonlinear functional relationship between glacial retreat rate and area, demonstrating that small glacial retreat is more sensitive under climate change. Further, the glacial retreat rate at the low-middle elevation zone was seen to be faster than that at the high elevation zone. The regional average terrestrial water storage(TWS) decrease rate in the Tianshan Mountains was –0.7±1.53 cm/a during 2003–2015. The highest TWS deficit region was located in the central part of the Tianshan Mountains, which was closely related to sharp glacial retreats. The increases in glacier and snow meltwater led to an increase in runoff in the three typical river basins, especially that of the Aksu River(0.4×10~8 m~3/a). The decreasing and thinning of areas, and increasing equilibrium line altitude(ELV) of glaciers have been the major causes for the decrease in runoff in the three river basins since the mid-1990 s. Therefore, the results reveal the mechanisms causing the impacts of glaciers and snow reduction in mountains on regional water resources under climate change, and provide a reference for water resources management in the mountainous river basins.     

Simulation and prediction of monthly accumulated runoff,based on several neural network models under poor data availability

Most previous research on areas with abundant rainfall shows that simulations using rainfall-runoff modes have a very high prediction accuracy and applicability when using a back-propagation(BP), feed-forward, multilayer perceptron artificial neural network(ANN). However, in runoff areas with relatively low rainfall or a dry climate, more studies are needed. In these areas—of which oasis-plain areas are a particularly good example—the existence and development of runoff depends largely on that which is generated from alpine regions. Quantitative analysis of the uncertainty of runoff simulation under climate change is the key to improving the utilization and management of water resources in arid areas. Therefore, in this context, three kinds of BP feed-forward, three-layer ANNs with similar structure were chosen as models in this paper.Taking the oasis–plain region traverse by the Qira River Basin in Xinjiang, China, as the research area, the monthly accumulated runoff of the Qira River in the next month was simulated and predicted. The results showed that the training precision of a compact wavelet neural network is low; but from the forecasting results, it could be concluded that the training algorithm can better reflect the whole law of samples. The traditional artificial neural network(TANN) model and radial basis-function neural network(RBFNN) model showed higher accuracy in the training and prediction stage. However, the TANN model, more sensitive to the selection of input variables, requires a large number of numerical simulations to determine the appropriate input variables and the number of hidden-layer neurons. Hence, The RBFNN model is more suitable for the study of such problems. And it can be extended to other similar research arid-oasis areas on the southern edge of the Kunlun Mountains and provides a reference for sustainable water-resource management of arid-oasis areas.     

Advances in thermokarst lake research in permafrost regions

A thermokarst lake is defined as a lake occupying a closed depression formed by ground settlement following thawing of ice-rich permafrost or the melting of massive ice. As it is the most visible morphologic landscape developed during the process of permafrost degradation, we reviewed recent literature on thermokarst studies, and summarized the main study topics as： development and temporal evolution, carbon release, and ecological and engineering influence of thermokarst lakes. The climate warming, forest fires, surface water pooling, geotectonic fault and anthropogenic activity are the main influencing factors that cause an increase of ground temperatures and melting of ice-rich permafrost, resulting in thermokarst lake formation. Normally a thermokarst lake develops in 3–5 stages from initiation to permafrost recovery. Geo-rectified aerial photographs and remote sensing images show that thermokarst lakes have been mainly experiencing the process of shrinkage or disappearance in most regions of the Arctic, while both lake numbers and areas on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau have increased. Field studies and modeling indicates that carbon release from thermokarst lakes can feedback significantly to global warming, thus enhancing our understanding of the influences of thermokarst lakes on the ecological environment, and on regional groundwater through drainage. Based on field monitoring and numerical simulations, infrastructure stability can be affected by thermal erosion of nearby thermokarst lakes. This review was undertaken to enhance our understanding of thermokarst lakes, and providing references for future comprehensive studies on thermokarst lakes.     

Recent advances in precipitation-bias correction and application

Significant progresses have been made in recent years in precipitation data analyses at regional to global scales. This paper re-views and synthesizes recent advances in precipitation-bias corrections and applications in many countries and over the cold re-gions. The main objective of this review is to identify and examine gaps in regional and national precipitation-error analyses. This paper also discusses and recommends future research needs and directions. More effort and coordination are necessary in the determinations of precipitation biases on large regions across national borders. It is important to emphasize that bias cor-rections of precipitation measurements affect both water budget and energy balance calculations, particularly over the cold regions.     

The coupled characteristics of the physical process between sea ice of two poles and Tibetan land surface

In order to discuss the characteristics of sea ice change of strong signal area on Antarctic and Arctic and the correlation between the thermal state on the land surface of Tibetan Plateau and the atmosphere circulation of North Hemisphere or the climate changes in China, and to study the feedback mechanism among “three-pole” factors, the earlier stage “three-pole” strong signal characteristics by using statistic methods such as teleconnection,which affect the regional climate changes in China and East Asia. The cross-correlation feature and coupling effect between ice caps of North and South pole and water-thermal state on Tibetan Plateau surface are discussed as well. The contribution of three-pole's earlier stage factors to China's summer climate change and the influence of its dynamic structure are compared here. The formation mechanisms of global climate change and regional climate change of China are investigated from the aspect of qualitative correlation mode of global sea-land-air-ice.     

Will Glacier No.1 Tianshan exist in the 22nd century?

Mountains have been described as the water towers of the world. Almost all major rivers have their sources in mountains; glaciers are important water resources that contribute meltwater to river discharge. Glaciers participate in the global water cycle and, with their solid water storage, are an important component of the water balance. As solid reservoirs, glaciers continue to receive the mass nourishment of solid precipitation from the atmosphere, and their meltwater feed and regulate river discharge. Physical changes in glaciers are an indicator of climate change. Over the past half century, the global temperature has increased by 1–2 °C, which emphasizes the urgent task of monitoring glaciers and predicting their trend. As an example, we have investigated, researched, and surveyed Glacier No.1 in the Urumqi River source, Tianshan (abbr. Glacier No.1 Tianshan or Glacier No.1) for half a century. We have found an increase by degrees of the glacial regression during the last 400 years and discovered a terminal moraine which is forming today. The global temperature is rising continually, while the local glacial temperature is 0.4 times that of the global temperature change. Thus, we forecast that Glacier No.1 Tianshan will disappear during the late 21^st Century (2074–2100 A.D.).     

Lake evolution and its implication for environmental changes in China during 1950–2000

Lakes in China have undergone considerable environmental changes during the past 50 years, e.g. lake level, water area changes, as did in the past several thousands years. The enhanced human activities, such as land reclamation, application of chemical fertilizer, land use and cover, irrigation and industrialization in the catchment etc., have played an important role on the recent decades＇ changes of these lakes, although constrained to a great extent by the natural impact. Comparative study on variations of lake volume （water level, depth and area） in the eastern and western lake regions of China during 1950-2000 indicated that, lake volume in the eastern region had approximately undergone a two-stage change, i.e. a dramatic decrease from the 1950s to 1970s, and a continuous increase between the 1980s and 1990s; while, in the western region, lake volume had been decreasing nearly all the time. Further studies on some typical lakes concluded that, climatic change was a primary factor for the variations of lake volume during the past 50 years, although human activities showed important effect.     

鄱阳湖非平稳水位波动及其与长江的交互作用关系(英文)

Seasonal water-level fluctuations(WLF) play a dominate role in lacustrine ecosystems. River-lake interaction is a direct factor in changes of seasonal lake WLF, especially for those lakes naturally connected to upstream and downstream rivers. During the past decade, the modification of WLF in the Poyang Lake(the largest freshwater lake in China) has caused intensified flood and irrigation crises, reduced water availability, compromised water quality and extensive degradation of the lake ecosystem. There has been a conjecture as to whether the modification was caused by its interactions with Yangtze River. In this study, we investigated the variations of seasonal WLF in China’s Poyang Lake by comparing the water levels during the four distinct seasons(the dry season, the rising season, the flood season, and the retreating season) before and after 2003 when the Three Gorge Dam operated. The Water Surface Slope(WSS) was used as a representative parameter to measure the changes in river-lake interaction and its impacts on seasonal WLF. The results showed that the magnitude of seasonal WLF has changed considerably since 2003; the seasonal WLF of the Poyang Lake have been significantly altered by the fact that the water levels both rise and retreat earlier in the season and lowered water levels in general. The fluctuations of river-lake interactions, in particular the changes during the retreating season, are mainly responsible for these variations in magnitude of seasonal WLF. This study demonstrates that WSS is a representative parameter to denote river-lake interactions, and the results indicate that more emphasis should be placed on the decrease of the Poyang Lake caused by the lowered water levels of the Yangtze River, especially in the retreating season.     

北京城市湿地时空演变及驱动力定量分析(英文)

The decision tree and the threshold methods have been adopted to delineate boundaries and features of water bodies from LANDSAT images. After a spatial overlay analysis and using a remote sensing technique and the wetland inventory data in Beijing, the water bodies were visually classified into different types of urban wetlands, and data on the urban wetlands of Beijing in 1986, 1991, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2007 were obtained. Thirteen driving factors that affect wetland change were selected, and gray correlation analysis was employed to calculate the correlation between each driving factor and the total area of urban wetlands. Then, six major driving factors were selected based on the correlation coefficient, and the contribution rates of these six driving factors to the area change of various urban wetlands were calculated based on canonical correlation analysis. After that, this research analyzed the relationship and mechanism between the main driving factors and various types of wetlands. Five conclusions can be drawn. (1) The total area of surface water bodies in Beijing increased from 1986 to 1996, and gradually decreased from 1996 to 2007. (2) The areas of the river wetlands, water storage areas and pool and culture areas gradually decreased, and its variation tendency is consistent with that of the total area of wetlands. The area of the mining water areas and wastewater treatment plants slightly increased. (3) The six factors of driving forces are the annual rainfall, the evaporation, the quantity of inflow water, the volume of groundwater available, the urbanization rate and the daily average discharge of wastewater are the main factors affecting changes in the wetland areas, and they correlate well with the total area of wetlands. (4) The hydrologic indicators of water resources such as the quantity of inflow water and the volume of groundwater are the most important and direct driving forces that affect the change of the wetland area. These factors have a combined contribution rate of 43.94%. (5) Climate factors such as rainfall and evaporation are external factors that affect the changes in wetland area, and they have a contribution rate of 36.54%. (6) Human activities such as the urbanization rate and the daily average quantity of waste-water are major artificial driving factors. They have an influence rate of 19.52%.     

中国城市空气质量时空演化特征及社会经济驱动力（英文）

Air pollution is a serious problem brought by the rapid urbanization and economic development in China, imposing great challenges and threats to population health and the sustainability of the society. Based on the real-time air quality monitoring data obtained for each Chinese city from 2013 to 2014, the spatiotemporal characteristics of air pollution are analyzed using various exploratory spatial data analysis tools. With spatial econometric models, this paper further quantifies the influences of socioeconomic factors on air quality at both the national and regional scales. The results are as follows:(1) From 2013 to 2014, the percentage of days compliance of urban air quality increased but air pollution deteriorated and the worsening situation in regions with poor air quality became more obvious.(2) Changes of air quality show a clear temporal coupling with regional socioeconomic activities, basically "relatively poor at daytime and relatively good at night".(3) Urban air pollution shows a spatial pattern of "heavy in the east and light in the west, and heavy in the north and light in the south".(4) The overall extent and distribution of regional urban air pollution have clearly different characteristics. The formation and evolution of regional air pollution can be basically induced as "the pollution of key cities is aggravated—pollution of those cities spreads— regional overall pollution is aggravated—the key cities lead in pollution governance—regional pollution joint prevention and control is implemented—regional overall pollution is reduced".(5) At the national level, energy consumption, industrialization and technological progress are the major factors in the worsening of urban air quality, economic development is a significant driver for the improvement of that quality.(6) Influenced by resources, environment and the development stage, the socioeconomic factors had strongly variable impacts on air quality, in both direction and intensity in different regions. Based on the conclusion, the regional differentiation and development idea of the relationship between economic development and environmental changes in China are discussed.     

Study of temperature and precipitation change in upstream mountain area of the Hexi inland river basin since 1960s

All rivers in the Hexi inland region of Gansu Province, China, originate from the northern slope of the Qilian Mountains. They are located in the southern portion of the region and respectively belong to the three large river systems from east to west, the Shiyang, Heihe and Shule river basins. These rivers are supplied by precipitation, snowmelt and ice-melt runoff from the Qilian Mountain area. Therefore, changes of precipitation and temperature in the upstream watersheds of these rivers have an important effect on changes of mountainous runoff and reasonable utilization of water resources in this region. For this reason, the Qilian Mountain area, upstream watersheds and runoff forming areas of these rivers are chosen as the study area. The change characteristics and variation trend of temperature and precipitation in this area under the backdrop of global warming are analyzed based on observational data of relational weather and hydrologic stations in the area. Results show that temperatures in the upriver mountain areas of these three large river basins have been increasing, although the increasing degree is differentially affected by global warming. The rising extent of annual and seasonal temperatures in the upstream mountain area of the Shule river basin located in the western Qilian Mountains, were all largest over the past 50 years. Precipitation in the upstream mountain areas of Hexi region’ three river basins located respectively in the western, middle and eastern Qilian Mountains have been presenting an increasing trend to varying degrees as a whole for more than 50 years. This means that climate in the upstream mountain areas of Hexi region’ three river basins are becoming increasingly warmer and moister over the past 50 years, which will be very good for the ecological environment and agricultural production in the region.     

信息技术时代的企业区位研究(英文)

The wide application of information and communication technologies(ICTs) has been argued to be critical to spatial transformation of firms.Recent advances in the studies along this line have challenged traditional location theory.The existing literature,however,focuses mainly on the impacts of ICTs on locational conditions and industrial spatial distribution.The dynamics behind such changes have not yet been given sufficient attention by geographers.Given this background,this paper investigates the impact of new ICTs on traditional location theory and the dynamics of industrial re-location that are enabled by new ICTs,based on data collected from an investigation of 178 firms.The paper argues that the application of new ICTs has been a key location factor in the information age,and that the time-cost is becoming critical to the spatial organization of firms,particularly as a result of a shorter product life and mass customization,among other dynamics.     

中国生态地理区域系统区划

Eco-geographic regionalization has been one of the most important topics in China‘s regionalization researches since the end of the 20th century. It is a major ecosystem in geographic zonality. A hierarchical system, which is formed by division or combination of natural features based on geographic relativity and comparison of major ecosystem factors (including biological and non-biological) and geographic zonality, is called eco-geographic regional system. This paper introduces process of China‘s regionalization development. The first level unit, temperature zone, is delineated with main criteria of temperature. The second level unit, humidity region, is based on criteria of water/moisture states. The third level unit, natural region, is divided according to medium geomorphologic units. Vegetation types and soils are applied as supplementary criteria to indicate temperature and water/moisture states. Mapping process from qualitative to quantitative and China‘s eco-geographic regional system are also explained in this paper.     

西北干旱地区大气降水δ18O的特征及水汽来源

In order to reveal the characteristics and climatic controls on the stable isotopic composition of precipitation over Arid Northwestern China, eight stations have been selected from Chinese Network of Isotopes in Precipitation (CHNIP). During the year 2005 and 2006, monthly precipitation samples have been collected and analyzed for the composition of δD and δ18O. The established local meteoric water line δD=7.42 δ18O+1.38, based on the 95 ob-tained monthly composite samples, could be treated as isotopic input function across the region. The deviations of slope and intercept from the Global Meteoric Water Line indicated the specific regional meteorological conditions. The monthly δ18O values were characterized by a positive correlation with surface air temperature (δ18O (‰) =0.33 T (℃)-13.12). The amount effect visualized during summer period (δ18O (‰) = -0.04P (mm)-3.44) though not appeared at a whole yearly-scale. Spatial distributions of δ18O have properly portrayed the atmospheric circulation background in each month over Arid Northwestern China. The quan-titative simulation of δ18O, which involved a Rayleigh fractionation and a kinetic fractionation, demonstrated that the latter one was the dominating function of condensation of raindrops. Furthermore, the raindrop suffered a re-evaporation during falling processes, and the pre-cipitation vapor might have been mixed with a quantity of local recycled water vapor. Multiple linear regression equations and a δ18O-T relation have been gained by using meteorological parameters and δ18O data to evaluate physical controls on the long-term data. The estab-lished δ18O-T relation, which has been based on the present-day precipitation, could be considered as a first step of quantitatively reconstructing the historical environmental climate.     

自然地理格局对区域发展时空分异影响的评价方法

With the rapid economic development during the last 30 years in China, more and more disparities have emerged among different regions. It has been one of the hot topics in the fields of physical geography and economic geography, and also has been the task for Chinese government to handle. Nevertheless, to quantitatively assess the impacts of physio-geographical patterns （PGP） on the regional development disparity has been ignored for a long time. In this paper, a quantitative method was adopted to assess the marginal effects of the PGP on spatio-temporal disparity using the partial determination coefficients. The paper described the construction of the evaluation model step by step following its key scientific thinking. Total GDP, per capita GDP, primary industrial output value and secondary industrial output value were employed in this study as the indicators to reflect the impacts of PGP on the regional development disparity. Based on the evaluation methods built by researchers, this study firstly analyzed the temporal impacts of the PGP on spatio-temporal disparity of the regional development in China during the past 50 years, and then explained the spatial differences at each development stage. The results show that the spatio-temporal disparity in China is highly related to the PGP, and that the marginal contribution rate could be employed as an effective way to quantitatively assess the impact of the PGP on spatio-temporal disparity of the regional development.