China's Ecological Restoration Programs: Initiation, Implementation, and Challenges -- Assessing China's Ecological Restoration Programs: What's Been Done and What Remains to Be Done? -- Methodology for an Integrative Assessment of China's Ecological Restoration Programs -- Land Cover Changes in Northeast China from the late 1970s to 2004 -- Modeling the Driving Forces of the Land Use and Land Cover Changes Along the Upper Yangtze River -- An Integrative Approach to Modeling Land Use Changes: The Multiple Facets of Agriculture in the Upper Yangtze Basin -- Quantifying Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Dynamics in the Upper Yangtze Basin from 1975 to 2000 -- Process-Based Soil Erosion Simulation on a Regional Scale: The Effect of Ecological Restoration in the Chinese Loess Plateau -- Conservation Payments, Liquidity Constraints and Off-Farm Labor: Impact of the Grain for Green Program on Rural Households in China -- An Empirical Analysis of the Effects of China's Land Conversion Program on Farmers’ Income Growth and Labor Transfer -- An Evaluation of the Impact of the Natural Forest Protection Programme on Rural Household Livelihoods -- An Estimation of the Effects of China's Forestry Programs on Farmers' Income -- Agricultural Productivity Changes Induced by the Sloping Land Conversion Program: An Analysis of Wuqi County in the Loess Plateau Region -- Measuring the Aggregate Socioeconomic Impacts of China's Natural Forest Protection Program.

China has been undertaking unprecedented ecological restoration efforts to deal with its problems of soil erosion, flooding, dust storms, and habitat loss. While there have been studies of these efforts, questions remain concerning whether they have been effectively implemented, what their induced socioeconomic and ecological impacts are, and how their performance can be improved. Tackling these important questions in an integrated manner, "An Integrated Assessment of China’s Ecological Restoration Programs" is extraordinary for its broad coverage and methodological rigor. It provides a substantial improvement over the conventional approach of simply reporting projects undertaken and accepting uncritically the government assessment, and thus fills an important knowledge gap of the restoration efforts being implemented upon a variety of ecosystems in China. Not only is this volume interesting and informative in conveying a general sense of ecological improvements, but it provides useful analytical methods and innovative research advances in assessing the effectiveness and impacts of similar programs and policies.