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Accurate high-resolution soil moisture mapping is critical for surface studies as well as climate change research. Currently, regional soil moisture retrieval primarily focuses on a spatial resolution of 1 km, which is not able to provide effective information for environmental science research and agricultural water resource management. In this study, we developed a quantitative retrieval framework for high-resolution (250 m) regional soil moisture inversion based on machine learning, multisource data fusion, and in situ measurement data. Specifically, we used various data sources, including the normalized vegetation index, surface temperature, surface albedo, soil properties data, precipitation data, topographic data, and soil moisture products from passive microwave data assimilation as input parameters. The soil moisture products simulated based on ground model simulation were used as supplementary data of the in situ measurements, together with the measured data from the Maqu Observation Network as the training target value. The study was conducted in the Zoige region of the Tibetan Plateau during the nonfreezing period (May–October) from 2009 to 2018, using random forests for training. The random forest model had good accuracy, with a correlation coefficient of 0.885, a root mean square error of 0.024 m³/m³, and a bias of −0.004. The ground-measured soil moisture exhibited significant fluctuations, while the random forest prediction was more accurate and closely aligned with the field soil moisture compared to the soil moisture products based on ground model simulation. Our method generated results that were smoother, more stable, and with less noise, providing a more detailed spatial pattern of soil moisture. Based on the permutation importance method, we found that topographic factors such as slope and aspect, and soil properties such as silt and sand have significant impacts on soil moisture in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau. This highlights the importance of fine-scale topographic and soil property information for generating high-precision soil moisture data. From the perspective of inter-annual variation, the soil moisture in this area is generally high, showing a slow upward trend, with small spatial differences, and the annual average value fluctuates between 0.3741 m3/m3 and 0.3943 m3/m3. The intra-annual evolution indicates that the monthly mean average soil moisture has a large geographical variation and a small multi-year linear change rate. These findings can provide valuable insights and references for regional soil moisture research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habitat suitability assessment is critical for wildlife population conservation and management planning. The MaxEnt model is widely used in species habitat suitability modeling. In order to investigate the habitat status of the black-necked crane in the Zoige grassland wetland ecological function area, this study evaluated the habitat suitability of the black-necked crane using the MaxEnt model with 152 occurrence records and 13 environmental variables. Based on the Akaike information criterion corrected for the small sample size, the best optimal parameter combination (feature class LQPHT, regularization multiplier 3.0) was selected. The results show that the Maxent model had good accuracy with an area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.895. Distance to roads, average summer precipitation, distance to lakes, and altitude are the dominant environmental variables affecting the potential distribution of black-necked cranes, with the contribution rates of 31.6%, 29.8%, 14.3%, and 8.2%, respectively. The suitable habitat area of black-necked cranes is mainly distributed in and around the Zoige Wetland National Nature Reserve, accounting for 46.49% of the Zoige Grassland Wetland National Key Ecological Function Zone. The potential distribution area has a tendency to spread to Hongyuan County in the south of the functional zone, and the unsuitable habitat is mainly distributed in the high-altitude area in the southwest of the functional zone. This study recommends focusing on the distribution area of black-necked cranes around Zoige Wetland National Nature Reserve and Hongyuan County to improve conservation strategies and strengthen protection efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-surface water is an important factor influencing the regional environment and climate and is a key factor in the Tibetan Plateau, which is one of the most sensitive regions to global changes. Because of the high elevation, complex topography, and erratic weather of the Tibetan Plateau, direct measurement of the area of every lake is largely unfeasible. Moreover, complex natural geographic conditions increase the difficulty of image processing and information extraction with remote sensing because they enhance the uncertainty of quantitative data retrieved with satellites. Methods based on spectral features do not generate the expected results of lake area over the Tibetan Plateau due to a lack of distinction between water and other land objects, especially snow, vegetation, and low cloud cover. Therefore, a new method to extract lake area from satellite images in the Tibetan Plateau is needed. In this article, an automatic method was proposed to evaluate lake area during the wet season (from 1 September to 31 October) on the Tibetan Plateau with multi-day Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) remote-sensing images on board the Meteorological Operational satellite-A (MetOp-A) satellite. The method considers both spectral and textural features of lakes and does not need a cloud mask as an input. In addition, the Mixture Tuned Matched Filtering (MTMF) algorithm was applied to decompose the mixed pixels to better identify lakes and estimate the lake area. Based on daily lake identifications, the wet season’s lake data were composited with the maximum value composition (MVC) method to determine the lake area. A comparison of our work with the manually interpreted results from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images and observational reports demonstrates the accuracy and reliability of our approach. However, certain factors, i.e. the sensor zenith angle of the polar-orbit satellite and the topography, can affect the lake area extracted from the remote-sensing images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]