Mingzhen Lu

Using a hybrid remote sensing approach to study the hybrid species sounds fitting, in this case study we demonstrate the potential carbon bias introduced by misclassifications of GEDI, this workflow can be extended to global, more to come. Congratulations to @aiyuzheng.bsky.social , great work!

Check out our new pre-print on extracting grassy trees from tropical structurally heterogenous forests!

Really excited about launching the universe of "Grassy Trees" to diversify plant growth forms in forest ecology! Bamboo, palms, and bananas are nature-based solutions that have already been working for thousands of years in many cultures. We just need to SEE them now.

Our new paper is out! "Grassy trees"--our best effort to name bamboo, palms, bananas that are culturally accepted as trees, function like trees, but grow like grasses! Once they are in your head, you see them everywhere. Join us to explore their power! #SustainableDevelopment

Well deserved! Complexity, a guided tour is a must read for anyone curious about complexity science, evolution, algorithms. Not only it provides so many pointers to foundational work, the writing is so clear that it made me a layman of computer science losing sleep thinking of Robby the robot.

Applications Now Open for Fall 2026 Cohorts
Apply by December 1, 2025 gsas.nyu.edu/admissions/a...

Nested economies of scale in city mass A longstanding puzzle in urban science is whether there's an intrinsic match between human populations and the mass of their built environments. Previous findings have revealed various urban propertie...

Fun facts: (1) globally each city resident shares city mass that is >5000 times of their body (2) cites analogous to Russian doll? economies of scale exists across nested scales. Sublinearity seems to be the glue that enables ever increasing urban complexity. arxiv.org/abs/2507.03960

Carbon-negative transition by utilizing overlooked carbon in waste landfills

the-innovation.org/article/doi/...

[3/3] Studying different forms of urban waste can open new doors toward carbon neutrality. It is fair to argue the study of waste represents a novel frontier in global biogeochemistry research.

[2/3] Landfills contribute to roughly one-tenth of global methane emissions, yet their standing carbon stock remains poorly characterized. In 346 Chinese cities alone, we estimate the landfill standing stock to be 0.5 Gigaton—equivalent to the weight of 50,000 Eiffel Towers.

Congratulations to Shijun for this new publication: Carbon-negative transition by utilizing overlooked carbon in waste landfills. We explored an overlooked aspect of the global carbon cycle: carbon stored in modern city landfills. #NovelFrontiers #GlobalBiogeochemistry #UrbanWaste #IndustrialEcology