Dynamic landscapes and the influence of human activities in the Yellow River Delta wetland region.

The Yellow River Delta (YRD) wetland is one of the largest and youngest wetland ecosystems in the world. It plays an important role in regulating climate and maintaining ecological balance in the region. This study analyzes the spatiotemporal changes in land use, wetland migration, and landscape pattern from 2013 to 2022 using Landsat-8 and Sentinel-1 data in YRD. Then wetland landscape changes and the impact of human activities are determined by analyzing correlation between landscape and socio-economic indicators including nighttime light centroid, total light intensity, cultivated land area and centroid, building area and centroid, economic and population. The results show that the total wetland area increased 1426 km2 during this decade. However, the wetland landscape pattern tended to be fragmented from 2013 to 2022, with wetlands of different types interlacing and connectivity decreasing, and distribution becoming more concentrated. Different types of human activities had influences on different aspects of wetland landscape, with the expansion of cultivated land mainly compressing the core area of wetlands from the edge, the expansion of buildings mainly disrupting wetland connectivity, and socio-economic indicators such as total light intensity and the centroid mainly causing wetland fragmentation. The results show the changes of the YRD wetland and provide an explanation of how human activities effect the change of its landscape, which provides available data to achieve sustainable development goals 6.6 and may give an access to measure the change of wetland using human-activity data, which could help to adject behaviors to protect wetlands.

Overexpression of a Vesicle Trafficking Gene, OsRab7, enhances salt tolerance in rice.

High soils salinity is a main factor affecting agricultural production. Studying the function of salt-tolerance-related genes is essential to enhance crop tolerance to stress. Rab7 is a small GTP-binding protein that is distributed widely among eukaryotes. Endocytic trafficking mediated by Rab7 plays an important role in animal and yeast cells, but the current understanding of Rab7 in plants is still very limited. Herein, we isolated a vesicle trafficking gene, OsRab7, from rice. Transgenic rice over-expressing OsRab7 exhibited enhanced seedling growth and increased proline content under salt-treated conditions. Moreover, an increased number of vesicles was observed in the root tip of OsRab7 transgenic rice. The OsRab7 over-expression plants showed enhanced tolerance to salt stress, suggesting that vacuolar trafficking is important for salt tolerance in plants.