Dr. Chunmiao Zheng currently holds the position of chair professor and dean of the School of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. He has also been chair professor and director of the Institute of Water Sciences at Peking University and the George Lindahl III Endowed Professor of Hydrogeology at the University of Alabama. The primary areas of his academic research are contaminant transport in the subsurface, groundwater management, and ecohydrological processes in large watersheds. He is developer of the widely used MT3D and MT3DMS series of contaminant transport models and author of the textbook Applied Contaminant Transport Modeling (Wiley). He has served as associate editor for five leading hydrology journals and as president of the International Commission on Groundwater of the International Association of  Hydrological Sciences. Among the numerous honors and awards he has received, Zheng is the recipient of the O.E. Meinzer Award from the Geological Society of America and the M. King Hubbert Award from the National Ground Water Association (USA). Zheng received his Ph.D.in hydrogeology with a minor in environmental engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prof. Guodong Cheng is an internationally renowned scientist at the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Engineering. Because of his research accomplishments in geocryology, he has received numerous prestigious awards including the Outstanding Achievement Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005, the Top Class National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2008, the Special Award for Outstanding Academic Papers from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology in 2007, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Permafrost Association. He has served as vice-president and president of the International Permafrost Association from 1988 to 1993 and from 1993 to 1998, respectively. Prof. Cheng has published more than 200 papers in peer- reviewed professional journals and several books. Dr. Bojie Fu is a distinguished professor of geography and landscape ecology at the State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco- Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is dean of the Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University. He is the member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), and corresponding fellow of the Royal Society Edinburgh, UK. He is president of the Geographical Society of China; director-general of the Department of Earth Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China; and director of the Division of Geosciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research areas are land use and land cover change, landscape pattern and ecological processes, and ecosystem services and management. He has published 10 books and more than 400 scientific papers in journals, including Science, Nature Geoscience, and Nature Climate Change. His awards and honors include China National Natural Science Prize, Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize of CAS, The Ho Leung Ho Lee Science and Technology Prize-Geosciences, and Award of Distinguished Service of the International Association for Landscape Ecology.