As a global and regional environmental problem, desertification assessment is an instrumental component in developing global/regional actions plans aimed at preventing and/or eradicating desertification issues. Using a landscape assessment approach allows for relatively quick assessments of desertification that can then be used in developing practicable application plans at the regional level in desertification prevention planning and decision-making.

Tsinghua University, one of the top universities in China, has conducted a lot of collaborative R&D projects with multinational companies in the recent years. One of tough issues in the collaborative R&D is to deal with the intellectual property rights. The Chinese Patent Law and other relevant laws make Tsinghua University to look for more intellectual property rights.

Human land use of forested regions has intensified worldwide in recent decades, threatening long-term sustainability. Primary effects include conversion of land cover or reversion to an earlier stage of successional development. Both types of change can have cascading effects through ecosystems; however, the long-term effects where forests are allowed to regrow are poorly understood. We quantify the regional-scale consequences of a century of Euro-American land use in the northern U.S.