Authors of the article declare that, with growing health risks from climate change and a trend of increasing carbon emissions from coal, it is time for China to take action. The 2023 China report of the Lancet countdown continues to track progress on health and climate change in China, while now also attributing the health risks of climate change to human activities and providing examples of feasible and effective climate solutions.

This article is a short review that explores different perspectives and approaches to the study of bark and what they reveal about the myriad ways bark surfaces influence the quality of sub-canopy precipitation.

Article describes study which assesses the relative accuracy of volunteer water quality data collected by the Texas Stream Team (TST) citizen science program from 1992–2016 across the State of Texas by comparing it to professional data from corresponding stations during the same time period.

This article considers positional shift and rotation angle deviation of the laser scanner and the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and presents a new method for calculating the incident angle based on the rigorous geometric measurement model for airborne light detection and range (LiDAR).

This article studies atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition in urban areas on two native prairie grass species, Schizachyrium scoparium and Nasella leucotricha. Findings indicate that while native prairie grasses may exhibit a positive biomass response to increased N deposition up to ~18 kg ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹, total inorganic N deposition is well above the estimated critical load for herbaceous plant species richness in the tallgrass prairie of the Great Plains ecoregion and thus may negatively affect these plant communities.

This article is a review examining the effects of forest patches on bees and pollination services to determine how to increase pollination service in agricultural landscapes.

This article proposes a three-dimensional (3D) vegetation extraction workflow to extract urban grasses and trees at individual tree level in urban areas using airborne LiDAR and hyperspectral data. Results suggest that two- and three-dimensional urban vegetation extraction could play a significant role in spatial layout optimization and scientific management of urban vegetation.

Article studying the change characteristics of soil moisture and temperature under different water level treatments in Wuchuan County, Inner Mongolia, China.

This article evaluates the effects of orchard development on deep soil water content (SWC) by using a meta-analysis of 162 sampling sites on the loess tableland from 44 peer-reviewed publications. The results showed that the deep SWC in orchards depended on stand age, planting density and annual precipitation.

Article describes how soil moisture (SM) and atmospheric humidity (AH) are crucial climatic variables that significantly affect the climate system. However, the combined influencing mechanisms of SM and AH on the land surface temperature (LST) under global warming are still unclear. The authors systematically analyzed the interrelationships among annual mean values of SM, AH, and LST using ERA5-Land reanalysis data and revealed the role of SM and AH on the spatiotemporal variations of LST through mechanism analysis and regression methods.

This article presents a comparative study of water indices and image classification algorithms for mapping inland water bodies using Landsat imagery through obtaining 24 high-resolution (≤5 m) and cloud-free images archived in Google Earth with the same (or ±1 day) acquisition dates as the Landsat-8 OLI images over 24 selected lakes across the globe, and developing a method to generate the alternate ground truth data from the Google Earth images for properly evaluating the Landsat image classification results.

This article develops and tests a constrained stochastic weather generator (CSWG) for producing daily mean air temperature and precipitation based on annual mean air temperature and precipitation from tree-ring records. It presents a unique method that can be used to explore historic (e.g., archeological questions) or future (e.g., climate change) daily weather conditions based upon specified annual values.

Article estimating the effects of different scenarios of forest fragmentation to find an optimized pattern of forest patches for increasing pollination in an agricultural landscape. The authors use simulated agricultural landscapes and landscape metrics to estimate the relationship between pollination and landscape structure.

Article investigating the impact of climate change on distributional and habitat quality changes of five wild bees in northwestern regions of Iran under two representative concentration pathway scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5). This study uses species distribution models to predict the potential range shift of these species in the year 2070.

This article examines the relationships between spatial patterns of long-term ozone exposure and respiratory illness within Dallas-Fort Worth to better understand impacts on health outcomes.

Article focusing on West Nile Virus (WNV), a mosquito borne pathogen, as a case study for spatial data visualization of environmental characteristics of a vector’s habitat alongside human demographic composition for understanding potential public health risks of infectious disease.

This article uses three common open-access satellite image datasets (Sentinel-2B, Landsat-8, and Gaofen-6) for extracting information on rocky desertification in a typical karst region (Guangnan County, Yunnan) of southwest China, using three machine-learning algorithms implemented in the Python programming language: random forest (RF), bagged decision tree (BDT), and extremely randomized trees (ERT).

Article examines the association between incorrect knowledge of ovulation and unintentional pregnancy/child among young women in sub-Saharan Africa countries.

This article presents geomorphic analysis of Xiadian buried fault in eastern Beijing plain (China), based on the analysis of a Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPOT-5) image, a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) derived from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system, SRTM DEM and field investigation. Results can provide valuable insight into geomorphic analysis of buried and semi-buried active faults in plain areas with increasingly frequent human activities.

Article discusses how China implemented the first phase of its National Healthy Cities pilot program from 2016-20. Authors recommend aligning the Healthy Cities initiative in China with strategic national and global level agendas such as Healthy China 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by providing an integrative governance framework to facilitate a coherent intersectoral program to systemically improve population health.

Article asserts that individual tree structure mapping in cities is important for urban environmental studies. The authors produced an individual tree dataset including tree locations, height, crown area, crown volume, and biomass over the entire New York City, USA for 6,005,690 trees, which enables the evaluation of urban forest ecosystem services.

Article describes how there is a growing need to apply geospatial artificial intelligence analysis to disparate environmental datasets to find solutions that benefit frontline communities. This research addresses these challenges by leveraging a strategically deployed, extensive low-cost sensor (LCS) network that was rigorously calibrated through an optimized neural network.

This article employs nighttime light (NTL) information as a proxy indicator of gross domestic product(GDP), and a future land use simulation model (FLUS) to simulate the land use patterns in Guangzhou from 2015 to 2018 and 2018 to 2035 by incorporating planning policies. This study demonstrates that NTL is a suitable and feasible proxy indicator of GDP for the land use simulations, providing a scientific basis for the development of urban planning and construction policy.

Article describes how forests are generally extracted from remotely sensed images based on the spectral features, ignoring other important auxiliary information, and the techniques of precise extraction need to be further improved. By using the Sentinel–2 image and auxiliary factors (AFs) including site conditions (SCs) and vegetation indices (VIs), the random forest model with AFs (RF–AFs) was adopted for the extraction of the economic forests in Lancang County, which is a mountainous area with rich biodiversity and is witnessing rapid development of economic forests in Yunnan province of China.