Accurate estimation of vegetation biophysical variables such as the vegetation canopy height (H) is of great importance to the applications of the land surface models. It is difficult to obtain the data ofHat the regional scale or larger scale, but the remote sensing provides the most useful and most effective method. The leaf area index (LAI) is closely related to theH, and we analyzed its relationship with the correlation analysis based on the dataset at 86 site-years of field measurements from sites worldwide in this study. The result indicates that there is significant positive exponent correlation between these two parameters and the change of LAI would exert great impacts onH. The higher the LAI is, the higher theHis, and vice versa. Besides, the coefficients of different land cover types are very heterogeneous, and LAI of the needleleaf forest shows strong correlation withH, while that of the cropland shows weak correlation withH. The results may provide certain reference information for the extraction of the data ofHat the regional scale with the remote sensing data.

Yunnan province is the core region of the drought in the Southwest China, which makes the region become the hot spot in the meteorological research. However, among the various influencing factors of the drought in Yunnan province, the influence of the land use/cover change (LUCC) on the drought has not been quantitatively analyzed. The LUCC in recent decades was first quantitatively analyzed in this study. Given the fact that severe drought in Yunnan province is mainly due to much-less-than-normal precipitation and much-warmer-than-normal surface temperature, this study focused on the future spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the temperature and precipitation, which have great impacts on the drought. Finally, the influencing factors of drought in Yunnan province were simulated with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, and the risk of drought was spatially analyzed with the meteorological drought composite index. The results indicate that the large-area forest plays a more important role in alleviating the risk of drought than other vegetation types do. Besides, the changes of the landscape structure resulting from the urban expansion play a significant role in intensifying the risk of drought.

Water yield is of great importance to the balance between supply and demand of water resources. The provision of freshwater for Dali is estimated and mapped in 1988, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2008, using the Integrated Valuation of Environmental Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) modeling toolset. The stability of water yield’s spatial variation is analyzed by a sorting method. The factors are explored which lead to the change in the relative water yield capacity. The yields at five points in time are compared, and the result of which shows a sharp fluctuation. The water yield curve is of a similar waveform as precipitation. An obvious and relatively stable spatial variation appears for water yield. The highest water yield areas are mainly located in the area where the elevation is high and both the elevation and the slope changes are large, and the main land uses are Shrub Land and High Coverage Grassland. The lowest areas are mainly in the eastern part of Erhai or the surrounding area. Precipitation, construction land expansion and the implementation of policy on land use are the three main factors which contribute to the change of the relative water yield capacity during 1988–2008 in Dali. In the study area, the water yield appears highly sensitive to the change in precipitation. The elasticity coefficient is calculated to illustrate the sensitivity of the water yield to the precipitation. When the elasticity index is larger, the risk of natural disaster will be higher.

The grassland is an important land use type that plays an important role in the ecosystem services supply in China. It is of great significance to the grassland management to determine the changing trend of grassland productivity and its response to climate change. Firstly, the relationship between grassland productivity and climate change, geographical conditions, and human activities was analyzed with the panel data of the whole China during 1980–2010 in this study. The result indicated that the temperature and precipitation were very important to grassland productivity at the national scale. Secondly, the grassland in China was divided into 7 grassland ecological-economic zones according to the ecosystem service function and climate characteristics. The relationship between grassland productivity and climate change was further analyzed at the regional scale. The result indicated that the temperature is more beneficial to the increase of the grassland productivity in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the Southwest Karst shrubland region. Thirdly, the increase of the temperature and precipitation can increase the grassland productivity and consequently relieve the pressure according to the climate factors of simulation with the community climate system model v4.0 (CCSM). However, the simulation result indicates that the human pressure on grasslands is still severe under the four RCPs scenarios and the grassland area would reduce sharply due to the conversion from the grassland to the cultivated land. What is more, there is still a great challenge to the increase of total grassland productivity in China.

There has been very limited research on water use efficiency for soil conservation (WUE-SC) in typical water scarce regions such as the lower Heihe River Basin, where there is serious wind erosion and the soil conservation service plays a key role in guaranteeing the ecological safety of Northern China. The soil conservation service, which was represented by the soil conservation amount (SC), was first estimated with an experiment-based model in this study. Then, the WUE-SC (i.e., SC/ET) was calculated on the basis of evapotranspiration (ET) data, and management implications were finally discussed. The results indicated the WUE-SC ranged between 0–98.69 t mm⁻¹, and it first decreased and then increased on the whole during 2000–2008. Besides, the inter-annual variation of WUE-SC was mainly due to change in the potential soil loss. In addition, the WUE-SC showed significant spatial heterogeneity, and the average WUE-SC of the whole study area was very low due to spatiotemporal inconsistency between the potential soil loss and the vegetation coverage rate. Although there are some uncertainties, these results still can provide local managers with valuable information for water resource utilization and ecosystem management to improve water use efficiency.