February, 2026
How can we build the homes the world needs—without destroying habitats on our planet? Our paper (https://doi.org/10.1038/s44458-025-00027-1) evaluates realistic pathways to decarbonize construction materials by 2050. It shows that while sustainable biomass supply is constrained for engineered bio-based products, low-carbon concrete can scale globally, offering a practical route to deliver housing and cut embodied carbon.
November, 2025
We recently visited the Lai Chi Wo coffee plantation to learn how agroforestry is being practiced in Hong Kong. Over the past decade, Lai Chi Wo’s coffee plantation has grown from a small pilot into a signature local agroforestry effort—rehabilitating abandoned terraces, expanding plantings, and learning-by-doing from early trial harvests.
October, 2025
This brief Nature reply (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09381-5) continues an important conversation on forest carbon accounting. We clarify key assumptions and methodological choices about the carbon implications of wood harvesting and forest management. The goal is to keep the debate constructive and transparent—so evidence can better inform forest policy and climate solutions.
October, 2025
Why is the planet “greening” and how much of it is actually driven by real changes in vegetation cover? In our paper (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-64305-1), we combine satellite observations with a data-driven attribution framework to quantify how vegetation cover changes global leaf area index (LAI) trends since the 1980s. We find vegetation cover change increasingly explains observed LAI, with tree-cover gains in the Northern Hemisphere partly offset by tropical deforestation.
October, 2025
We are recruiting new PhD students for 2026 fall.
September, 2025
Staying within Earth’s environmental limits won’t happen with incremental tweaks. This study (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101351) shows we likely need ambitious, combined interventions—including lower animal-source-food diets, major improvements in farming efficiency and nutrient management, and reductions in overconsumption and food waste—to meaningfully cut the risk of crossing key planetary thresholds.
September, 2025
We are pleased to welcome Shihan Wang to APLUS. He is deeply curious about the full spectrum of processes linking satellite observations and ground-based measurements.
July, 2025
Liqing conducted a short-term research visit at the Department of Earth System Science at Tsinghua University.
July, 2025
Liqing visited the mountain forest carbon-sink ecological site in Longyan (Fujian Province), a cutting-edge flux-tower platform designed specifically for complex mountainous terrain. The site features two fixed towers spanning a valley, plus a cable-driven moving tower/platform that traverses between them (super cool!). This allows near-continuous measurements of CO₂, water vapor, energy and related exchanges across topographic gradients.
June, 2025
This analysis (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01731-2) finds that preserving woody debris (e.g., logging residues, mill wastes) by placing it deeper in soils could extend carbon residence times and enable CO₂ removal potential in managed forests.
June, 2025
How do our diets ripple through water systems? This paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01188-x) links shifts in meat consumption to changes in agricultural nutrient pollution, showing that dietary change can be a powerful lever for improving groundwater quality alongside farm management. It adds a fresh “water-quality” dimension to food-system sustainability conversations.
May, 2025
We are excited to share that Liqing has been awarded the HKU-Cambridge Fellowship. We are really excited for the collaborations and new ideas this opportunity will bring.
January, 2025
We are pleased to welcome Chunyue to APLUS. She is broadly interested in agricultural carbon mitigation and food security.
December, 2024
We were delighted to welcome Princeton Professor Tim Searchinger to APLUS. During his visit, we hosted a focused workshop on Sustainable Agriculture in China, bringing together Tim with Professors Zhenzhong Zeng, Yixin Guo, and Peng Zhu for an engaging exchange on research frontiers, policy relevance, and opportunities for collaboration.
October, 2024
Drought indices often assume the land surface is “uniform,” but real landscapes aren’t. This paper (https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-1277-2024) proposes an enhanced SPEI approach that integrates land-surface and vegetation characteristics into estimating evaporative demand, improving drought monitoring, especially in the forests where surface properties strongly shape how quickly moisture is pulled from soils and vegetation.