CmPIF8-CmERF27-CmACS10-mediated ethylene biosynthesis modulates red light-induced powdery mildew resistance in oriental melon.

Powdery mildew is a serious fungal disease in protected melon cultivation that affects the growth, development and production of melon plants. Previous studies have shown that red light can improve oriental melon seedlings resistance to powdery mildew. Here, after inoculation with Podosphaera xanthii, an obligate fungal pathogen eliciting powdery mildew, we found that red light pretreatment increased ethylene production and this improved the resistance of melon seedlings to powdery mildew, and the ethylene biosynthesis gene CmACS10 played an important role in this process. By analysing the CmACS10 promoter, screening yeast one-hybrid library, it was found that CmERF27 positively regulated the expression of CmACS10, increased powdery mildew resistance and interacted with PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTOR8 (CmPIF8) at the protein level to participate in the regulation of ethylene biosynthesis to respond to the red light-induced resistance to P. xanthii, Furthermore, CmPIF8 also directly targeted the promoter of CmACS10, negatively participated in this process. In summary, this study revealed the specific mechanism by which the CmPIF8-CmERF27-CmACS10 module regulates red light-induced ethylene biosynthesis to resist P. xanthii infection, elucidate the interaction between light and plant hormones under biological stress, provide a reference and genetic resources for breeding of disease-resistant melon plants.

Differentiated impacts of environmental contexts on residents' environmental attitudes towards ecological restoration programs of China's drylands.

Residents' environmental attitudes (EAs) towards ecological restoration programs are vital for evaluating program effectiveness and promoting environmental management. However, most local studies have neglected the indirect environmental contextual influences on residents' EAs, and have omitted the regional variations in the environmental contextual influences. To investigate the multilevel factors affecting residents' EAs, we conducted a transect survey that included the eastern, middle, and western regions in northern China's drylands, where have experienced ecological restoration. Multilevel linear models (MLMs) were applied to analyse the direct and indirect impacts of environmental contexts and individual characteristics on rural residents' EAs. The results showed the environmental context can indirectly impact EAs by amplifying the influence of individual characteristics such as family structure and income on EAs. The EAs are influenced by different local environmental contexts among the east, middle and west of China's drylands. The humidity attitude was influenced by precipitation only in the highly arid western and middle regions, while precipitation attitude is strongly influenced by land surface temperature and humidity in eastern China's drylands. These findings hold important implications for understanding the cross-scale impact of environmental contexts on EAs in drylands.

Bleak prospects and targeted actions for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

At the mid-point to 2030, progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) varies significantly across countries. While the classification of countries can lay the foundation for improving policy efficiency and promoting joint action, bottom-up, SDG data-driven country classifications have largely remained unexplored. Here, we classified 166 countries based on their performances in the 17 SDGs and further used the classification to analyze SDG interactions and compare development aid distributions. The countries were classified into five groups, ranging from "lowest development with good environment" to "high development needing climate action". None of them scored highly in all SDGs, and due to trade-offs related to environment and climate SDGs, none of them can achieve all SDGs eventually. To maximize the potential for achieving the SDGs, all countries need to undergo a sustainable transformation, and prioritizing certain SDGs, such as SDG 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure), can help countries with lower sustainable development levels achieve more with less. Furthermore, global development aid should be better aligned with country needs, particularly in areas of education, energy, environment, and water supply and sanitation. By better characterizing different countries, this study reveals the bleak prospects of achieving all SDGs and provides valuable insights into more targeted actions for national sustainable development and global collaboration.

Three main dimensions reflected by national SDG performance.

Unraveling the complexity of the 17 interacting sustainable development goals (SDGs) is crucial for their achievement. Empirically revealing the dimensions of the SDGs helps generalize the dominant features of SDGs and better understand their drivers. Here, using a database of 166 countries' progress toward achieving each individual SDG, we found that about 70% of the variability of national SDG performance can be captured by three dimensions: socioeconomic development at the expense of resource and climate, the environment, and development at the expense of equality. Moreover, these dimensions are mainly affected by the economy; as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increases, the first dimension increases monotonically, the environment dimension decreases and then increases, and the inequality dimension increases and then decreases. Our findings indicate a dim prospect of eventually achieving all SDGs because of the conflicts between economic growth and resource and climate goals under the current development paradigm, highlighting the importance of sustainable transformation.

PIF8-WRKY42-mediated salicylic acid synthesis modulates red light induced powdery mildew resistance in oriental melon.

Light signals and plant hormones are involved in regulating the growth, development and stress resistance of plants; however, it remains unclear whether light affects hormones and thus pathogen resistance in oriental melon. Here, we found that red light promoted salicylic acid (SA) accumulation and powdery mildew resistance by activating the transcription of CmICS, the key gene for SA biosynthesis, and silencing CmICS seriously weakened the induction effect of red light on powdery mildew resistance in oriental melon leaves. Further studies showed that red light induced the expression of CmWRKY42 under powdery mildew stress, and CmWRKY42 directly bound to the CmICS promoter to activate its expression and promote the accumulation of SA under red light. Furthermore, we found that PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTOR 8 (PIF8), as a negative regulator of SA biosynthesis, inhibits CmWRKY42 transcriptional activation by binding to the CmWRKY42 promoter, and thus inhibits transcriptional activation of CmICS by CmWRKY42. Also, CmPIF8 binds to the CmICS promoter and directly inhibits its transcription. In conclusion, our study revealed a new molecular mechanism of the relationship between red light-SA-powdery mildew resistance and provided a theoretical basis for resistance breeding of oriental melon.

The community perception of human-water connections is indirectly influenced by the landscape context: A case study in the lower reaches of the Yellow river.

Humans and water are closely connected in large river basins and form social-ecological systems (SESs). However, cross-scale effect in SESs make it difficult to identify the key forces driving human-water connections at the community scale when ignoring the landscape context. Focusing on the incongruous human-water relationships in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, we built local resident perception-based networks linking the agricultural subsystem, environmental subsystem, and cultural subsystem by distributing farmer household questionnaires and extracted 13 indicators from 7 kinds of network metrics to indicate human-water connections. We applied analysis of variance (ANOVA), random forest (RF) and multilevel linear model (MLM) methods to identify the driving forces of perception-based human-water connections among 20 factors at both the community and landscape scales. The results showed that the perception-based network indicators were mainly directly influenced by community-level driving factors, especially the accessibility of information, such as the frequency of going out, the frequency of accessing the Yellow River channel, and the information source for the national policy on the Yellow River. The influences of community-level driving factors on network indicators were affected by landscape-level driving factors, e.g., the nighttime light, population density, gross domestic product and proportion of artificial land, thus indicating indirect influences from the landscape context. These analyses and findings can enrich the methods by which social, ecological and hydrological elements are structurally linked in sociohydrologic research and highlight the cross-scale effect of the landscape context on human-water systems at the community level.

Smart City + IoT Standardization Application Practice Model and Realization of Key Technologies.

Smart city gathers heterogeneous information, which requires a unified data access and collection mechanism. In this paper, based on the computing framework of IoT put forward to satisfy urban sensing network data acquisition, transmission, and computing technology system, according to the function requirements of IoT gateway, we put forward the method of building software system and hardware system and the urban perception network middleware architecture that can meet the demand of M2M, which can realize dynamic management of cognitive resources. It also supports ubiquitous services over HTTP. This is of great significance for providing intelligent services with diversity of solvers, controllers, and computing terminals. This paper focuses on how to comprehensively apply intelligent sensing, wireless transmission, data mining, and other technologies of the Internet of Things to associate data with typical application examples such as vehicle sensing and positioning technology and urban security sensor application. These typical applications can effectively solve the practical problems in urban operation and management, meet the needs of the expansion of the concept of Internet of things in urban management and the continuous deepening of management, and improve the scientific and intelligent level of urban operation and management.

Accelerated increase in vegetation carbon sequestration in China after 2010: A turning point resulting from climate and human interaction.

China has increased its vegetation coverage and enhanced its terrestrial carbon sink through ecological restoration since the end of the 20th century. However, the temporal variation in vegetation carbon sequestration remains unclear, and the relative effects of climate change and ecological restoration efforts are under debate. By integrating remote sensing and machine learning with a modelling approach, we explored the biological and physical pathways by which both climate change and human activities (e.g., ecological restoration, cropland expansion, and urbanization) have altered Chinese terrestrial ecosystem structures and functions, including vegetation cover, surface heat fluxes, water flux, and vegetation carbon sequestration (defined by gross and net primary production, GPP and NPP). Our study indicated that during 2001-2018, GPP in China increased significantly at a rate of 49.1-53.1 TgC/yr2 , and the climatic and anthropogenic contributions to GPP gains were comparable (48%-56% and 44%-52%, respectively). Spatially, afforestation was the dominant mechanism behind forest cover expansions in the farming-pastoral ecotone in northern China, on the Loess Plateau and in the southwest karst region, whereas climate change promoted vegetation cover in most parts of southeastern China. At the same time, the increasing trend in NPP (22.4-24.9 TgC/yr2 ) during 2001-2018 was highly attributed to human activities (71%-81%), particularly in southern, eastern, and northeastern China. Both GPP and NPP showed accelerated increases after 2010 because the anthropogenic NPP gains during 2001-2010 were generally offset by the climate-induced NPP losses in southern China. However, after 2010, the climatic influence reversed, thus highlighting the vegetation carbon sequestration that occurs with ecological restoration.

Spatial variation and influencing factors of the effectiveness of afforestation in China's Loess Plateau.

Payment for ecosystem services (PES) has become a widely accepted strategy for combining environmental conservation or restoration with socioeconomic development. Understanding the spatial heterogeneity of the effects of PES programs and their influencing factors is necessary for the design and implementation of effective programs. However, few researchers have both distinguished the effects of PES and analyzed their spatial variation simultaneously. Here, we analyzed the spatial differences in the effectiveness of afforestation under China's Grain-to-Green Program (GTGP), a well-known PES program, in the Loess Plateau. The approach is based on remote sensing data and county-level statistical data, which reflects the basic implementation unit of the GTGP. We identified several local and non-local influencing factors: the aridity index, rural non-farm employment, and rural migration improved afforestation effectiveness, whereas the total afforestation degree (the cumulative area of afforestation divided by the total area), vegetation conditions before afforestation, grain production, and investment in fixed assets decreased its effectiveness. Based on our results, we propose several suggestions for improvement: preferring afforestation in humid counties with low vegetation cover, identifying an optimal degree of afforestation, and promoting the transformation of rural livelihoods. Our study provides a general approach to analyze the effectiveness of PES and its spatial variation, thereby providing insights into future PES programs both within China and around the world.

Multilevel analysis of factors affecting participants' land reconversion willingness after the Grain for Green Program.

Understanding the postprogram land use plans of participants is necessary for the sustainability of the conservation achievements from payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs. Previous studies have analyzed many individual factors affecting participants' reconversion plans after PES programs. However, whether the regional ecosystem services changes caused by PES programs affect reconversion willingness remains elusive. Here, we used the multilevel linear model to determine the effects of regional ecosystem services changes and individual characteristics on participants' land reconversion willingness after the Grain for Green Program (GFGP) in the Yanhe watershed of the Loess Plateau. We found that household income, ecological awareness, and employment changes negatively affected reconversion willingness, while nonfarm employment positively affected it at the individual level. At the regional level, the grain production and water yield changes could influence the reconversion willingness of respondents with different individual characteristics. With improved understanding of the factors affecting reconversion willingness, several suggestions to improve the sustainability of the GFGP were proposed. Our study provides a template for analyzing the multilevel factors that affect the sustainability of other PES programs.

Evolution and effects of the social-ecological system over a millennium in China's Loess Plateau.

Understanding the regime shifts of social-ecological systems (SES) and their local and spillover effects over a long time frame is important for future sustainability. We provide a perspective of processes unfolding over time to identify the regime shifts of a SES based on changes in the relationships between SES components while also addressing their drivers and local and spillover effects. The applicability of this approach has been demonstrated by analyzing the evolution over the past 1000 years of the SES in China's Loess Plateau (LP). Five evolutionary phases were identified: "fast expansion of cultivation," "slow expansion of cultivation," "landscape engineering for higher production," "transition from cultivation to ecological conservation," and "revegetation for environment." Our study establishes empirical links between the state (phase) of a SES to its drivers and effects. Lessons of single-goal driven and locally focused SES management in the LP, which did not consider these links, have important implications to long-term planning and policy formulation of SES.

Socio-ecological changes on the Loess Plateau of China after Grain to Green Program.

Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) is now widely accepted as a policy tool for advancing both ecological and social progress. The Chinese government's Grain to Green Program (GTGP) is the world's largest PES program. It was initiated nearly 20 years ago to reverse previous environmental degradation. However, it is difficult to achieve both conservation and economic "win-win" gains, and care is needed in monitoring environmental and socioeconomic outcomes. Here we choose the Loess Plateau (LP), the area where GTGP was implemented most intensively, to study the social-ecological changes after GTGP and determine whether these changes are related to GTGP. The results show that LP has achieved "win-win" gains of restoring environment and promoting socioeconomic development: normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series show a significant greening trend, and soil retention and carbon sequestration services have improved from 2000 to 2015. Simultaneously, grain output from the LP has increased by 56.7%. We also analyzed the effects of afforestation on changes of socio-ecological factors, and find that the changes of NDVI, soil erosion, and carbon sequestration mainly reflect the degree of afforestation rather than climate change, while the correlations between changes of socioeconomic factors and degree of afforestation are insignificant. We conclude that, despite some adverse outcomes such as water yield reduction, GTGP in LP has achieved considerable overall success in environmental factors. However, comprehensive and quantitative evaluation of the social impacts of GTGP is needed, as the impacts are clouded by multiple socioeconomic factors.

Variations of Runoff and Sediment Load in the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Yangtze River, China (1950-2013).

On the basis of monthly runoff series obtained in 1950-2013 and annual sediment load measured in 1956--2013 at five key hydrological stations in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River basin, this study used the Mann-Kendall methods to identify trend and abrupt changes of runoff and sediment load in relation to human activities. The results were as follows: (1) The annual and flood season runoffs showed significant decreasing trends at Yichang station, and showed slight downward trends at Hankou and Datong stations, while the abrupt changes of dry season runoff at Yichang, Hankou and Datong stations occurred in about 2007 and the change points were followed by significant increasing trends. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam, which began to operate in 2003, influenced the variations of runoff in the mainstream of Yangtze River, but the effect weakened with the distance along the downstream direction from TGD. (2) Since the 1990s, annual sediment loads at Yichang, Hankou, and Datong stations have been decreasing significantly, and after 2002, the annual sediment load at Yichang dropped below that of Hankou and Datong. The dams and deforestation/forestation contributed to the significant decreasing trend of the sediment load. In addition, the Three Gorges Dam aggravated the downward trend and caused the erosion of the riverbed and riverbanks in the middle and lower reaches. (3) The runoff and sediment load flowing from Dongting Lake into the mainstream of the Yangtze River showed significant decreasing trends at Chenglingji station after 1970s, and in contrast, slight increase in the sediment flow from Poyang Lake to the mainstream of the Yangtze River at Hukou station were detected over the post-TGD period (2003-2013). The result of the study will be an important foundation for watershed sustainable development of the Yangtze River under the human activities.

[Metabolomic approach to evaluating the effect of the mixed decoction of kelp and licorice on system metabolism of SD rats].

The aim of the study is to evaluate the effects of the single and mixed decoction of Thallus laminariae (kelp) and Glycyrrhiza glabra (licorice) on the metabolism and their difference. The mixed decoction of kelp and licorice and the single decoction were made and intragastrically administered to the SD rats. The effect on system metabolism, the toxicity of liver and kidney were assessed by GC-MS profiling of the endogenous molecules in serum, routine biochemical assays and histographic inspection of tissues from SD rats, separately. The mixed decoction of kelp and licorice induced more obvious pathological abnormalities in SD rats than a single decoction of kelp, while the extracts of licorice did not show any pathological change. Neither the mixed, nor the single decoction showed abnormal histopathology. After intragastric administration of extracts for 5 days, the mixed decoction induced a decrease of ALT (no significant change in the groups of single decoction) and an increase of BUN (so did the single decoction of kelp). Metabolomic profile of the molecules in serum revealed that the metabolic patterns were all obviously affected for the three groups, i.e., the mixed and single decoction of kelp and licorice. The rats given with the single decoction of kelp showed a similar pattern to that of the mixed decoction, indicating that the kelp primarily contributed the perturbation of metabolism for the mixed decoction. All three groups induced a decrease of branched chain amino acids, TCA cycle intermediates and glycolysis intermediates (e.g., pyruvic acid and lactic acid) and an increase of 3-hydroxybutyric acid. Kelp decoction showed stronger potential in reducing TCA cycle intermediates and glycolysis intermediates than the other two groups, while the levels of branched chain amino acids were the lowest after licorice extracts were given. These results suggested that the effect of the mixed decoction on metabolism was closely associated with both kelp and licorice. The continuous administration of single decoction of kelp and the mixed decoction of licorice and kelp resulted in pathological abnormalities in kidney of SD rats. The mixed decoction of kelp and licorice distinctly perturbed sera molecules and hence system metabolism, which showed associated with those of kelp and licorice. Although the metabolic effect was associated with both kelp and licorice, the results suggested kelp contributed to it primarily.

[The influence of further processing on Psoralea corylifolia alcohol extracts and the content of psoralen and isopsoralen].

OBJECTIVE: To improve the processing method of Psoralea corylifolia. METHODS: The self-made processing machine was used to flatten Psoralea corylifolia. Then it was extracted with water soluble and alcohol soluble with Psoralea corylifolia unflatten as the amount of Psoralea corylifolia and the content of psoralen and isopsoralen were factors. HPLC was used. The analytical column was a Supelco ODS-C18. The mobile phase consisted of methanol-water (43:57). The detector wavelength was 246 nm. The column temperature was 30 degrees C. RESULTS: Under the same condition, the conditioning treatment increased the water or ethanol extracting amount of Psoralea corylifolia and the content of psoralen and isopsoralen of the processing samples compared with the unconditioning treatment. The amount of water soluble extracts and erhanol soluble extracts increased 0.61 times and 1.53 times, respectively. And the content of psoralen and isopsoralen in water soluble and erhanol soluble extracts increased 1.22 times. CONCLUSION: The method to flatten Psoralea corylifolia can significantly improve the content of extraction and extraction rate of active components. It can also enhance the clinical effectiveness. The method is reasonable and deserves to be popularized.