Drinking water is essential for the health, everyday life and social development of human beings. Its importance is evident to all the people. Because China now is experiencing an unprecedented urbanization progress in the world, its demand for enough and clear drinking water is expanding every year. Unfortunately, many cities and towns in China are suffering from the pollution of source water,...

Although air quality monitoring networks have been greatly improved, interpreting their expanding data in both simple and efficient ways remains challenging. Therefore, needed are new analytical methods. We developed such a method based on the comparison of pollutant concentrations between target and circum areas (circum comparison for short), and tested its applications by assessing the air po...

Urban megaregions have emerged as a new urbanized form. However, previous studies mostly focused on urban expansion at the city scale, particularly for large cities. Understanding urban expansion at the regional scale including cities having different sizes is important for extending current knowledge of urban growth and its environmental and ecological impacts. Here, we addressed two questions...

This paper proposes a cost-benefit framework to address the role of parcel and neighborhood conditions, as well as government policies, and investigates the spatial determinants of urban land expansion in Nanjing, one of the sub-centers of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD). Using spatial regression models, we find the significance of the economy of scale, agglomeration, accessibility, and governmen...

As a way of turning sea into land for living space for humans, the actions of sea reclamation bring about significant benefits. Nevertheless, it is also an under-recognized threat to the environment and the marine ecosystem. Based on images in two periods, sea reclamation information of countries around the South China Sea was extracted from 1975 to 2010. The spatial state and driven forces of ...

Anthropogenic heat generated by human activity contributes to urban and regional climate warming. Due to the resolution and accuracy of existing anthropogenic heat data, it is difficult to analyze and simulate the corresponding effects. This study exploited a new method to estimate high spatial and temporal resolutions of anthropogenic heat based on long-term data of energy consumption and the ...