The sea level rise under global climate change and coastal floods caused by extreme sea levels due to the high tide levels and storm surges have huge impacts on coastal society, economy, and natural environment. It has drawn great attention from global scientific researchers. This study examines the definitions and elements of coastal flooding in the general and narrow senses, and mainly focuses on the components of coastal flooding in the narrow sense. Based on the natural disaster system theory, the review systematically summarizes the progress of coastal flood research in China, then discusses existing problems in present studies and future research directions with regard to this issue. It is proposed that future studies need to strengthen research on adapting to climate change in coastal areas, including studies on the risk of multi-hazards and uncertainties of hazard impacts under climate change, risk assessment of key exposure (critical infrastructure) in coastal hotspots, and cost-benefit analysis of adaptation and mitigation measures in coastal areas. Efforts to improve the resilience of coastal areas under climate change should be given more attention. The research community also should establish the mechanism of data sharing among disciplines to meet the needs of future risk assessments, so that coastal issues can be more comprehensively, systematically, and dynamically studied.
Lebensraum is a core concept that Friedrich Ratzel created while he first founded political geography. In 1901, based on the study of anthropogeography, Ratzel came up with two analytical frameworks of spatial politics, "lebensraum" and "national organism," and the word lebensraum has attracted much attention since then. Haushofer, Ratzel's student and a used-to-be soldier devoted to national interests, contributed to the use of lebensraum in geopolitics and military science. Along with the rising popularity of geopolitics, lebensraum was developed into a geopolitical concept to explain the evolution of country system, which served as a theoretical support for Fascism. In the first half of the 20th century, German geographers played a leading role in lebensraum research. With the end of World War II, neither lebensraum nor geopolitics escaped from condemnation. Treating lebensraum as a weapon speaking for fascist states, Anglophone geographers tried to keep away from it, leading to its abandonment in the West. Due to the different language and a relatively independent academic community from the West, some Japanese geographers took up the study of lebensraum from a regional planning perspective since the 1960s. With political geography back into humanism view since the late 1980s, lebensraum liberated from the darkroom of German geopolitics, and there have been increasingly more geographers aware of the enormous theoretical value behind the concept. Through a brief review of the development process of lebensraum, this article aims to reveal the status and role of lebensraum in understanding the analytical framework of political geography, the relationship between human and land, space governance, and decision making of human agency.
Foreign researches on negotiation of leisure constraints appeared in the 1990s, and is now the frontier field of leisure constraints research. In this study, a total of 136 articles in the Web of Science database from 1985 to 2018 were taken as sample data, and the bibliometric analysis tool of CiteSpace Ⅲ information visualization software was used to perform a comprehensive review of these articles. Based on the growth in the number of articles and the change of research hotspots, the foreign researches on negotiation of leisure constraints can be divided into three stages: embryonic stage (1993-1999), exploration stage (2000-2010), and rapid development stage (2011 till now). Scholars and institutions who focus on negotiation of leisure constraints mainly come from the United States and Canada, followed by Australia and South Korea. In the early stage, the studies were conceptual and descriptive, empirical research emerged since the 21st century, and the research content has developed from simple descriptive classification to multivariate model building and validation. The researches involved a wide range of crowd, ranging from the general population to special social groups, such as people with special diseases, people with disabilities and Muslim women. The contents focus on the constraints and negotiations of physical activity, outdoor recreation and serious leisure. At present, cross-cultural research has become a hot topic in foreign leisure researches. These foreign researches are of great significance to the theoretical and practical work of China's leisure study.
As one of the core concepts of human geography, place identity reflects the subjects' emotional attachment to the place. It not only can affect residents' satisfaction and tourists' loyalty to the place, but also affects the subjects' environmental behavior, and thus affects the sustainable development of tourism. Based on the related literature in China and internationally, this article makes a comprehensive analysis of the connotation, dimension, and influencing factors and mechanisms of place identity. The main conclusions include: 1) Understanding of place identity connotation and division of its dimensions are dependent on the academic backgrounds of researchers and the purposes of research. There are five logical relationships between place identity and related concepts. Connotation analysis based on the new epistemology will help promote the understanding of the concept of place identity. Further clarification of the relationships between place identity and related concepts helps to standardize the classification, methods, and applicable standards. 2) Factors affecting place identity include individual, local natural environmental, social, culture factors, and so on. The study of human-environment relationship of human geography is the main paradigm of place identity research. Application of multiple theoretical perspectives is an important direction for examining the influencing factors and mechanisms of place identity in the future. 3) Place identity research in China started late. Although scholars in China and abroad agree on the core content of place identity research, the depth and breadth of their research are different. Only a few scholars in China pay attention to the impact of spatial scale and local landscape on place identity. Research on the relationship between climate, time, and place identity is the key content that needs to be focused on in the future.
Global cities are stepping into the metropolitan era at a high speed. Studying the process of urban expansion in metropolitan areas is of great significance for understanding its future growth trend and regional sustainable development. However, urban expansion in metropolitan area, especially regional comparative analysis, has not been extensively understood. Taking three metropolitan areas—Tokyo, New York, and Shanghai—as examples, we obtained Landsat images in three time periods between 1990 and 2015 (circa 1990, 2000, and 2014). Using gradients and grid analysis and applying urban land density function and urban expansion index, we analyzed the spatiotemporal differences of urban expansion in two time periods from multiple perspectives. We focused on the quantitative changes and spatiotemporal distributions of built-up land, as well as urban form changes. The results show that: 1) Boundaries of these metropolitan areas were expanding and built-up land continued to grow during the study period. The built-up land area in Tokyo, New York, and Shanghai increased by 63%, 53% and 233%, respectively, over the study period. Shanghai experienced intense expansion while urban expansion in New York stagnated during the later period. 2) The density of built-up land in these metropolitan areas gradually decreases with the distance from the city center. The growth of the radii is most obvious in urban core and urban fringe, and the urban forms all tend to be compact. 3) Spatiotemporal heterogeneity of new construction land is apparent. In Tokyo, construction of new urban areas is continuous in the suburban region. In New York, some regional sub-centers with potential for growth were still expanding but the rate gradually slowed, while in Shanghai the peripheral areas of the urban core area had grown rapidly and progressively advanced to the urban fringe. 4) Regional expansion of the metropolitan areas has successively experienced high-speed growth, slow growth, and stagnation period. The expansion process manifests itself as urban core expansion, sub-center and new urban area construction, then gradually forms a stable polycentric structure.
With human-centered development as the key principle of urban development in China, urban studies and urban planning are paying more attention to the construction of urban living space and the improvement of residents' life quality, and the importance of research on residents' neighborhood satisfaction is increasing. Under the background of rapid suburbanization and the construction of community life circle, this study used primary data on residents' daily activities and travel behaviors from 10 towns in the Shanghai suburbs to empirically investigate residents' neighborhood satisfaction. We constructed a theoretical model based on Campbell's Model, and then examined the interactions between neighborhood built environment, perceived neighborhood characteristics, and residents' neighborhood satisfaction by combining subjective and objective assessments. A structural equation model was used to verify the impact pathways and mechanisms. The results show that perceived neighborhood characteristics have direct and decisive influences on residents' neighborhood satisfaction, and residents' perceptions on the neighborhood situation of health, convenience, safety, and appearance all have significant positive impacts on residents' satisfaction. Factors of the built environment such as density, accessibility, and facility situation impact residents' satisfaction indirectly through perceived neighborhood characteristics. Residents' socioeconomic characteristics have little influence on their neighborhood satisfaction, and the main influencing factors of residents' satisfaction are neighborhood characteristics.
Revealing the impact of land conversion on land surface temperature is of great significance for understanding the climatic and environmental effects of human activities. Statistical analysis based on satellite remote sensing data is an important method to reveal the impact of land use/cover change on land surface temperature. However, in areas with high landscape fragmentation, the mixed pixel problem has become the main limiting factor for the use of this technology, especially in the Yangtze River Basin in southern China. In order to break through this limitation, 200 pairs of pure pixels of cropland and woodland were identified on the 1 km scale based on Google Earth high-definition images. Then, the differences of land surface temperature (LST), leaf area index (LAI), and albedo between cropland and woodland were compared and analyzed by MODIS land data products. The results show that the LST of cropland was higher than that of woodland, and the temperature differences between daytime and nighttime were about 2.75 ℃ and 1.15 ℃, respectively. Daytime temperature difference between cropland and woodland showed double peaks (May and October, with temperature differences about 3.18 ℃ and 3.33 ℃), and nighttime temperature difference showed a single peak (July, about 2.46 ℃). Temperature difference varied from place to place. The highest temperature difference was in the west—in the area bordering Shaanxi and Gansu Provinces, annual average temperature difference was about 3.83 ℃; and temperature difference was the smallest between central and southern Anhui Province (about 1.1 ℃). The difference of LST between cropland and woodland is mainly caused by the difference of evapotranspiration. The LAI of woodland is larger, the evapotranspiration is stronger, the latent heat flux from the surface to the atmosphere is higher, and the sensible heat used to directly heat the surface is relatively less, so the LST is relatively low. The above results show that the conversion of cropland to woodland in the Yangtze River Basin and adjacent areas has a cooling effect by increasing evaporation in recent years.
This study investigated possible relationships between winter sea surface temperature (SST) and the interannual variation of spring wind speed in the agro-pastoral transitional zone of Northern China by employing daily wind speed observations of 64 meteorological stations, the extended reconstructed sea surface temperature, version 5 (ERSST v5) dataset, and the ERA-Interim reanalysis data. The results show that spring wind exhibited strong year-to-year variations. During the period of 1979-2016, the interannual components accounted for 36% of the total variance. Winter SST, which affects the interannual variation of wind speed in the study area in spring, presented a negative-positive-negative distribution between 20°N-65°N in the North Atlantic, and a negative-positive distribution in the domain of 10°N-55°N and 130°W-180° in the North Pacific Ocean. Interannual variations of surface spring wind in the study area were significantly related to the North Atlantic SST index (r = 0.50) and the North Pacific SST index (r = 0.44). The large-scale atmospheric circulation in the northern hemisphere is the bridge that links winter SSTs and the spring wind. In association with the North Atlantic SST anomalies of negative-positive-negative distribution from high to low latitudes, a wave pattern of pressure height anomalies appeared over the North Atlantic and Eurasia. Accompanying a negative-positive distribution in North Pacific SST anomalies, the pressure height anomalies from the North Pacific to East Asia presented a three-wave pattern. Both of them can lead to an anomalous cyclonic circulation over East Asia in spring. The anomalous cyclonic circulation existed in both the middle and the lower troposphere, which was the factor directly resulting in higher wind speed over the study area. The significant correlation between winter SST and spring wind speed implies that winter SST can be used as a skillful predictor for spring wind in practice. A statistical forecast model with winter SSTs in the North Atlantic and North Pacific as predictors can explain 32% of the interannual variance of the spring wind speed. Cross-validation shows that the time lag relationship between SST and wind speed is significant and robust.
Due to the complex plateau climate and unique geographical environment, the vegetation responds strongly to climatic shifts on the Tibetan Plateau. Therefore, it is of great significance to discuss the causality between vegetation and climate changes. Using the meteorological dataset including average temperature and precipitation and the GIMMS (Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies) NDVI3g remote sensing data from 1982 to 2012 to analyze the causal relationship between NDVI and its influencing factors at the monthly and seasonal scales by the Granger causality test on the pixel level, this study examined the response of plateau vegetation (mainly grassland) to average temperature and precipitation change and causality. The results show that: 1) The stationarity proportion of vegetation NDVI and average temperature (99.13%), NDVI and precipitation (98.68%) at the monthly scale was higher than at the seasonal scale (64.01% and 71.97% respectively). 2) Lagging effects of average temperature on NDVI and precipitation on NDVI were around 12-13 months at the monthly scale and mainly 3, 4, and 6 quarters at the seasonal scale on the Tibetan Plateau. The three vegetation types—desert steppe, typical steppe, and meadow steppe—showed high similarities at the monthly scale, while greater heterogeneity was observed at the seasonal scale. 3) For 98.95% of the area covered by vegetation on the Tibetan Plateau, it is believed that average temperature change was the Granger cause of NDVI change, while for 89.05% of the region (except for the southeast), NDVI change was supposed to be the Granger cause of average temperature change at the monthly scale. At the seasonal scale, average temperature change was considered the Granger cause of NDVI change in 92.03% of the regsion (except for the central part of the Tibetan Plateau). Nevertheless, in the eastern and western parts of the plateau (about 50.55% of the region), NDVI change was interpreted as the Granger cause of average temperature change. 4) In the northeast and northwest of the region (about 98.95% of the area) precipitation change was believed to be the Granger cause of NDVI change, while in 94.86% of the region (except for a few areas in the southeast) NDVI change was supposed to be the Granger cause of precipitation change at the monthly scale. At the seasonal scale, precipitation change was considered the Granger cause of NDVI change in the southeastern part of the plateau (61.43% of the area). Nevertheless, in the central and eastern parts of the region (about 48.98% of the area), NDVI change was interpreted as the Granger cause of precipitation change. Overall, climatic factors on the Tibetan Plateau have an interactive relationship with vegetation and each can cause a Grainger effect to the other, with climatic factors having stronger Grainger effect on vegetation than the other way round. The Granger effect region on the Tibetan Plateau at the monthly scale is larger than the Granger effect region at the seasonal scale.
Export growth is a key driver for China's economic development. The entry of new export firms is an important indicator of export growth. The New Trade Theory believes that knowledge spillover brought about by agglomeration externalities is a crucial factor affecting the exporting decision making of firms. Global and local knowledge spillovers encourage firms to acquire necessary export knowledge and thus reduce their difficulty of entering export markets. Theories of evolutionary economic geography emphasize that cognitive proximity is the prerequisite for the validity of export spillovers. Global and local export experience and product proximity are the main contents of export spillovers. This study used China Customs Trade Data from 2002 to 2011 to analyze the impact of export spillovers on the entry of new firms into the export market. The results show that export spillovers can significantly increase the probability of new exporters entering the export market. Private firms are more likely to enter markets with stronger spillovers. Besides, export spillovers have a stronger role in promoting the entry of follower firms, especially domestic firms. State-owned collective enterprises emphasize the overflow of overall export experience, and private companies place more emphasis on product knowledge spillovers. Local spillovers are beneficial for the expansion of new exporting firms to new destination countries, while global spillovers are useful for new exporters expanding into new product areas. This study improved the research on the spatial dynamics of export firms, expanded the spatial dimension in which export spillovers affect export decisions, and helped deepen the understanding of China's trade market.
Technology transfer is an important means to promote coordinated regional development and efficient allocation of innovative resources. Patent transfer is a major part of China's technology transfer trading market, but the mechanism behind it has not been fully explained. By using the existing genetic distance estimation method and the widely recognized Han population genetic data, this study explored the mechanism of cross-regional patent transfer from the perspective of genetic differences. By mining the patent transfer data of the Patent Search Platform of the State Intellectual Property Office and combining with other economic geographic data, we conducted a quantitative research on whether genetic distance has affected inter-provincial patent transfer. Considering the principle of "same-sex repelling and opposite-sex attracting," a model was constructed from the perspective of technical competition. Results of the regression analyses of the panel data show that the farther the genetic distance is, the more likely it is to have inter-regional patent transfers. In general, for one-standard-deviation rise of genetic differences between two provinces, the number of patent transfers between them increased by 9.8%. The results have undergone several robustness tests and the spatial differences also have been considered. This study highlights the importance of genetic diversity for human society, and suggests that policies should relax migration and settlement restrictions and encourage inter-regional exchanges and integration.
From the perspective of human-environmental system vulnerability and following the steps of depicting evolution trajectory-describing the situations-analyzing evolution paths and mechanisms, combined with the ground-truthing method, this study explored the change of rural human settlement in the semi-arid area of the Loess Plateau represented by Jiaxian County of Shaanxi Province. The main results are as follows: 1) The quantitative assessment of the vulnerability of rural human settlement synthetic system and subsystems in Jiaxian County from 1980 to 2016 shows that, the natural system has changed from vulnerable to droughts to vulnerable to floods. Since the 21st century, vulnerability of the housing system has been reduced, while the vulnerability of the supporting system has been aggravated. In the past decade, the vulnerability of the social system has been gradually reduced, and the human system has moved to a severe level of vulnerability. Composite vulnerability remained at moderate levels. 2) The study defined five types of vulnerability situations, including persistent vulnerability, uncontrolled vulnerability, controllable vulnerability, stable healthy state, and volatile systems, and proposed the thresholds for crossing vulnerability types. Vulnerability in the case area has gone through four stages between persistent vulnerability systems and uncontrolled vulnerability systems. 3) The research not only reconstructed the dynamic mechanism of the gradual change of vulnerability of the rural human settlement and identified the evolutionary path of vulnerability of five subsystems, but also extracted 20 key influencing events involving five driving factors—climate change, urbanization disturbance, market change, policy intervention, and farmers' behavioral adaptation. In the end, the article puts forward some suggestions on how to improve rural human settlement and facilitate the rural rehabilitation and revitalization.
Hongshui River Basin in Southwestern China is the main sediment source of the Pearl River. In order to determine the features of sediment load and its influencing factors in the basin from 1955 to 2016, this study identified three periods of sediment load change by using rank order cluster analysis, and calculated the contribution of average precipitation, water yield capacity, and sediment concentrations to the change of sediment load by means of sediment source attribution. On this basis, the main factors affecting the change of sediment load were further analyzed. The results suggest that 1963 and 1991 were the two turning points of sediment load at the Qianjiang Station in the basin. Due to the variation of sediment concentration, sediment load changed greatly before and after these two points, and human activities were the main driving force of the change of sediment load in this basin. During 1955-1991, the increase of sediment load in the Hongshui River was mainly caused by the increase of soil erosion as a result of deforestation and reclamation in the basin. From 1964 to 2016, 83.49% of the total sediment load reduction was caused by reservoir construction, while the increase of vegetation coverage contributed 12.03% to the decrease of sediment load in the same period. Comparing the results of the WaTEM/SEDEM model with the above results, it is also found that reservoir construction accounted for the vast majority (81.03%) of the total reduction between 1964 and 2016, while the contribution of land-use change to the reduction of sediment load was relatively small (18.97%).
The introduction of the relationship between humanistic geography and phenomenology is limited among Chinese geographers who mainly focus on Yi-Fu Tuan's works and opinions. David Seamon is another key figure in humanistic geographic study. By reviewing Seamon's book on A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter, this article aims to enhance people's understanding of humanistic geography. This book is one of the representative works of the realm, and its publication coincided with the prevalence of western humanistic geography. Through the perspective of phenomenology, Seamon explores the interaction between the experience of human body and the daily geographical world, creatively introduces concepts of body-subject and perception. He emphasizes that the place ballet based on body-subject is the result of the interaction between human and environment in a specific time and space, that is, the dynamics of time-space rhythm. The book is divided into five parts, among which the second, third and fourth parts concentrate the author's main academic views corresponding to the "movement", "rest" and "encounter" in the subtitle of the book, respectively. Phenomenology is the philosophical foundation of humanistic geography with its obscure content. This article examines cases both from the book and from our daily experiences to introduce Seamon's main ideas. In our viewpoints, first, this book makes the abstract phenomenological concepts and methods more accessible and understandable by describing abundant environmental experiences in our everyday life. For example, fingers of a pianist freely press the piano keys without seeing musical score; a person's feet can automatically adjust his or her pace according to the road conditions. Seamon calls such movements as "body ballet", which implies the movement sequence of such pre-conscious body. This review article gives an example in hand to explain how body ballet links to place ballet. In a traditional market, it is quite usual to hear peddlers' yo-heave-ho, and to see sellers weighing and packing goods, and then making change for the customers… The series of actions are the vendor's body ballet. The body ballet of both customers and vendors constitutes the place ballet of the market. Second, the content of this book may be useful for those who engage in urban planning/design and environmental education. Seamon suggests that the street pattern, porch design, and other physical space planning could enhance or weaken the integration and coordination of the place ballet in a community. As for environmental education, Seamon stresses that our attention should be paid more to the process that might lead people to sensitize to all sorts of settings. He also attempts to make people realize that ways to encounter with environments are diverse and dynamic, and even promotes to enhance the ability to observe and experience the environment with the help of technology. In this way, any individual could increase such sensitivity of his/her own, and find meanings and beauties in seemingly ordinary places. Third, it is a pity that the comparison between humanistic geography and 'scientific' modern geography has not been aroused enough attention yet, and the advantages of phenomenological research methods should been unfolded much better. Fourth, with the phenomenological attitude, there is no doubt that this article reveals the subjectivity and intentionality of the two authors.
