In China, rapid urbanization in recent decades has led to increasingly serious ecological and environmental problems, threatening sustainable development. Thus, a clear understanding of the relationship between urbanization and eco-environment is the basis for achieving regional sustainable development. However, despite the current global explosion of research interests on this topic, few studies have focused on ecologically fragile areas. To fill this gap, taking Aba Autonomous Prefecture in the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau as a case study, we explored the relationship between urbanization and eco-environment from 2001 to 2018 using a coupled coordination degree model. The results show that the urbanization level and eco-environmental quality in Aba Prefecture achieved stable and continuous improvements from 0.202 to 0.428 and 0.372 to 0.422, respectively. Moreover, the coupling degree between them ranged from 0.524 to 0.652, indicating that the study area had transformed from uncoordinated development in the initial stage to transformation development in the final stage. Additionally, over the 18 years, the coordinated state of urbanization and eco-environment improved, with the coordinated level increasing from reluctant to moderate coordination after 2011. Lastly, we confirmed that urbanization in Aba Prefecture had an overall positive effect on the local eco-environment, although it gradually decreased as urbanization progressed. These findings have important implications for political decision-makers to achieve high-quality development in ecologically fragile areas.

A number of previous studies have contributed to a better understanding of the thermal impacts of dam-related reservoirs on stream temperature, but very few studies have focused on air temperature, especially at the catchment scale. In addition, due to the lack of quantitative analysis, the identification of the effects of water impoundment on regional air temperature is still lacking. We investigated the impacts of reservoirs on the regional air temperature changes before and after two large dam constructions in the lower Jinsha River located in southwest China, by using a 40 year record of reanalysis data at 90 m resolutions. Furthermore, the long short-term memory (LSTM) model was also employed to construct an impoundment effect on the temperature (IET) index. Research results indicate that compared to the pre-impoundment period (1980–2012), the variations in the air temperature at the catchment scale were reduced during the post-impoundment period (2013–2019). The annual maximum air temperature decreased by 0.4 °C relative to the natural regimes. In contrast, the cumulative effects of dam-related reservoirs increased the annual mean and minimum air temperature by 0.1 °C and 1.0 °C, respectively. Warming effects prevailed during the dry season and in the regions with high elevations, while cooling effects dominated within a 4 km buffer of the reservoirs. Therefore, this study offers important insights about the impacts of anthropogenic impoundments on air temperature changes, which could be useful for policymakers to have a more informed and profound understanding of local climate changes in dammed areas.

Purpose: Vegetation is a typical sensitive indicator of climate change, and therefore provides theoretical and valuable information for addressing issues arising from climate change including improving soil ecosystem services. Exploring how vegetation responses to climate change has become one of major hotspots of research. However, few scholars have performed bibliometric analyses of this field. This study investigated the current research activities and the trend developments of vegetation responses to climate change. Materials and methods: We conducted a quantitative bibliometric analysis of 2,310 publications on vegetation responses to climate change from 1991 to 2021 retrieved in the Web of Science Core Collection. The analysis comprised significant journals, disciplines, and scholars, as well as partnerships between countries and institutions, keyword co-occurrence and burst analysis. The bibliometric analysis tools, Histcite, Vosviewer, CiteSpace software, and R (Bibliometrix package), were applied. Results and discussion: The related publications on vegetation responses to climate change had been increasing exponentially in the past 30 years and its total global cited score reached its peak in 2010. The USA and China were the leading countries, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences having the highest number of publications and citations. The scholars who had the most citations were Allen CD, Bresears DD, and Running SW. Six research clusters were generated by keywords co-occurrence analysis, including impact, response, CO₂, growth, climate change, and vegetation. These clusters represented the current research topics that highlighted the responses of vegetation to climate change, the manifestation of its impact, and coping strategies. In future research on vegetation, the emphasis is expected to be placed on “human activities” and “N₂O emission”. Conclusion: This study has performed a comprehensive and systematic and quantitative analysis of the publications on the responses of vegetation to climate change. The results reveal the characteristics, development patterns, and research trends of studies on vegetation activity in response to climate change, which sheds new insights into understanding the relationship between soil and climate.