Kailiang Yu

5.2k total citations · 2 hit papers
79 papers, 3.3k citations indexed

About

Kailiang Yu is a scholar working on Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation and Plant Science. According to data from OpenAlex, Kailiang Yu has authored 79 papers receiving a total of 3.3k indexed citations (citations by other indexed papers that have themselves been cited), including 46 papers in Global and Planetary Change, 27 papers in Nature and Landscape Conservation and 23 papers in Plant Science. Recurrent topics in Kailiang Yu's work include Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics (36 papers), Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies (26 papers) and Tree-ring climate responses (10 papers). Kailiang Yu is often cited by papers focused on Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics (36 papers), Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies (26 papers) and Tree-ring climate responses (10 papers). Kailiang Yu collaborates with scholars based in United States, China and Switzerland. Kailiang Yu's co-authors include Paolo D’Odorico, Thomas W. Crowther, Gabriele Manoli, William R. L. Anderegg, Markus Schläpfer, Simone Fatichi, Gabriel G. Katul, Paolo Burlando, Naika Meili and Elie Bou‐Zeid and has published in prestigious journals such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and PLoS ONE.

In The Last Decade

Kailiang Yu

76 papers receiving 3.2k citations

Hit Papers

align trajectories

What are hit papers?

Hit papers significantly outperform the citation benchmark for their cohort. A paper qualifies if it has ≥500 total citations, achieves ≥1.5× the top-1% citation threshold for papers in the same subfield and year (this is the minimum needed to enter the top 1%, not the average within it), or reaches the top citation threshold in at least one of its specific research topics.

Magnitude of urban heat islands largely explained by climate and population

2019 832 citations Kailiang Yu, Elie Bou‐Zeid et al. profile →
Hydraulic diversity of forests regulates ecosystem resilience during drought

2018 432 citations William R. L. Anderegg, Anna T. Trugman et al. profile →

Peers — A (Enhanced Table)

Peers by citation overlap · career bar shows stage (early→late) cites · hero ref

Name	h						Papers	Cites
Kailiang Yu United States	28	1.8k	897	698	607	560	79	3.3k
Rüdiger Grote Germany	39	2.4k 1.3×	662 0.7×	1.5k 2.2×	1.2k 1.9×	758 1.4×	100	4.3k
Fei Lu China	28	2.2k 1.2×	532 0.6×	327 0.5×	379 0.6×	410 0.7×	67	4.0k
Rich Pouyat United States	14	2.1k 1.1×	914 1.0×	223 0.3×	636 1.0×	1.2k 2.2×	19	4.0k
Constantin M. Zohner Switzerland	26	2.3k 1.2×	488 0.5×	566 0.8×	1.1k 1.8×	261 0.5×	63	4.0k
Andreas Heinemeyer United Kingdom	31	2.3k 1.3×	370 0.4×	317 0.5×	854 1.4×	505 0.9×	59	4.2k
Joe R. McBride United States	26	1.4k 0.8×	525 0.6×	389 0.6×	734 1.2×	1.0k 1.8×	76	2.6k
Pavel Cudlín Czechia	28	946 0.5×	284 0.3×	379 0.5×	444 0.7×	289 0.5×	146	2.5k
Jennifer C. Jenkins United States	25	3.1k 1.7×	1.0k 1.2×	504 0.7×	2.0k 3.4×	326 0.6×	40	4.9k
Rajiv Kumar Chaturvedi India	18	2.3k 1.2×	406 0.5×	672 1.0×	440 0.7×	154 0.3×	48	3.2k
Weixing Zhu United States	33	1.3k 0.7×	362 0.4×	318 0.5×	791 1.3×	622 1.1×	99	4.2k

Countries citing papers authored by Kailiang Yu

Since Specialization

Citations

This map shows the geographic impact of Kailiang Yu's research. It shows the number of citations coming from papers published by authors working in each country. You can also color the map by specialization and compare the number of citations received by Kailiang Yu with the expected number of citations based on a country's size and research output (numbers larger than one mean the country cites Kailiang Yu more than expected).

Fields of papers citing papers by Kailiang Yu

Since Specialization

Physical SciencesHealth SciencesLife SciencesSocial Sciences

This network shows the impact of papers produced by Kailiang Yu. Nodes represent research fields, and links connect fields that are likely to share authors. Colored nodes show fields that tend to cite the papers produced by Kailiang Yu. The network helps show where Kailiang Yu may publish in the future.

Co-authorship network of co-authors of Kailiang Yu

This figure shows the co-authorship network connecting the top 25 collaborators of Kailiang Yu. A scholar is included among the top collaborators of Kailiang Yu based on the total number of citations received by their joint publications. Widths of edges represent the number of papers authors have co-authored together. Node borders signify the number of papers an author published with Kailiang Yu. Kailiang Yu is excluded from the visualization to improve readability, since they are connected to all nodes in the network.

All Works

Sort: Min cites: Since: Top N: Style:

20 of 20 papers shown

Brandt, Martin, Li Zhang, Xiaowei Tong, et al.. (2026). Enhanced forest management rather than afforestation has dominated China’s carbon sink over recent decades. Communications Earth & Environment. 7(1).

Yao, Guang‐Qian, Xiangling Fang, Kailiang Yu, et al.. (2025). Stomatal‐based immunity differentiation across vascular plant lineages. New Phytologist. 246(3). 1183–1197. 2 indexed citations

Yu, Xiaoyu, Rui Xiao, Zhonghao Zhang, et al.. (2025). Rising disparities in grain self-sufficiency across China: Provincial divergence amidst overall national improvement. Environmental Impact Assessment Review. 114. 107942–107942. 3 indexed citations

Zhang, Baolei, Qian Zhang, Chunlin Li, et al.. (2025). Global urbanization indirectly ‘enhances’ the carbon sequestration capacity of urban vegetation. Geography and sustainability. 6(3). 100268–100268. 9 indexed citations

Yu, Kailiang, Paolo D’Odorico, Ana Novoa, et al.. (2024). Potential expansion of plants with crassulacean acid metabolism in the Anthropocene. BioScience. 74(7). 478–487. 4 indexed citations

Liu, Xiaorong, Kailiang Yu, Hui Liu, et al.. (2024). Contrasting drought tolerance traits of woody plants is associated with mycorrhizal types at the global scale. New Phytologist. 244(5). 2024–2035. 4 indexed citations

Tian, Lei, Xiaohui Song, Kailiang Yu, et al.. (2024). Climate warming advances plant reproductive phenology in China’s northern grasslands. Journal of Plant Ecology. 17(6). 3 indexed citations

Yu, Kailiang, Philippe Ciais, A. Anthony Bloom, et al.. (2023). Biogeographic pattern of living vegetation carbon turnover time in mature forests across continents. Global Ecology and Biogeography. 32(10). 1803–1813. 1 indexed citations

Li, Hailing, César Terrer, Miguel Berdugo, et al.. (2023). Nitrogen addition delays the emergence of an aridity-induced threshold for plant biomass. National Science Review. 10(11). nwad242–nwad242. 19 indexed citations

10.

Jin, Ying, Guang‐You Hao, William M. Hammond, et al.. (2023). Aridity‐dependent sequence of water potentials for stomatal closure and hydraulic dysfunctions in woody plants. Global Change Biology. 29(7). 2030–2040. 28 indexed citations

11.

Yu, Kailiang, et al.. (2023). Biocrusts modulate carbon losses under warming across global drylands: A bayesian meta-analysis. Soil Biology and Biochemistry. 188. 109214–109214. 8 indexed citations

12.

Ren, Chengjie, Fei Mo, Zhenghu Zhou, et al.. (2022). The global biogeography of soil priming effect intensity. Global Ecology and Biogeography. 31(8). 1679–1687. 31 indexed citations

13.

Chen, Ning, et al.. (2020). Biocrust as one of multiple stable states in global drylands. Science Advances. 6(39). 69 indexed citations

14.

Hammond, William M., et al.. (2019). Dead or dying? Quantifying the point of no return from hydraulic failure in drought‐induced tree mortality. New Phytologist. 223(4). 1834–1843. 215 indexed citations

15.

Kulmatiski, Andrew, Kailiang Yu, D. S. Mackay, et al.. (2019). Forecasting semi‐arid biome shifts in the Anthropocene. New Phytologist. 226(2). 351–361. 6 indexed citations

16.

Chen, Ning, Zak Ratajczak, & Kailiang Yu. (2019). A dryland re‐vegetation in northern China: Success or failure? Quick transitions or long lags?. Ecosphere. 10(4). 10 indexed citations

17.

Jia, Rongliang, Ning Chen, Kailiang Yu, & Changming Zhao. (2018). High rainfall frequency promotes the dominance of biocrust under low annual rainfall. Plant and Soil. 435(1-2). 257–275. 11 indexed citations

18.

Yan, Hao, Kailiang Yu, Bin Wang, et al.. (2017). A Novel Diffuse Fraction‐Based Two‐Leaf Light Use Efficiency Model: An Application Quantifying Photosynthetic Seasonality across 20 AmeriFlux Flux Tower Sites. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. 9(6). 2317–2332. 35 indexed citations

19.

Li, Honglin, et al.. (2016). Structural, compositional and trait differences between the mature and the swamp meadow communities. Journal of Plant Ecology. 11(1). 158–167. 5 indexed citations

20.

Yu, Kailiang, et al.. (1994). Preloading Organic Soils to Limit Future Settlements. 476–490. 3 indexed citations

Rankless uses publication and citation data sourced from OpenAlex, an open and comprehensive bibliographic database. While OpenAlex provides broad and valuable coverage of the global research landscape, it—like all bibliographic datasets—has inherent limitations. These include incomplete records, variations in author disambiguation, differences in journal indexing, and delays in data updates. As a result, some metrics and network relationships displayed in Rankless may not fully capture the entirety of a scholar's output or impact.

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