Diversity

The endangered Chinese horseshoe crab (Tachypleus tridentatus) suffers severe habitat degradation and coastal tourism disturbance across its nursery habitats along the Southeast China coast. Community-based conservation (CBC) acts as a valuable complementary area-based conservation measure; yet few integrated domestic case studies combine ecological field monitoring with quantitative social–ecological assessment. Based on a community-led conservation initiative at Tangdong Village, Fujian Province, this study integrates non-destructive seasonal juvenile horseshoe crab surveys, questionnaire-driven social–ecological evaluation (n = 130), and coupling coordination and obstacle degree modeling, together with multi-year project archival records. The results reveal that overlying water physicochemical parameters (temperature, salinity, pH) at Chujiao (Antenna) Beach maintain suitable ranges for juvenile T. tridentatus across seasons; seasonal juvenile counts peaked in summer (145) and were zero in winter (12, 145, 36, and 0 in spring, summer, autumn, and winter, respectively), with a peak pooled density of 11.33 ind./100 m², and this abundance peak temporally coincides with the peak tourist season. The tourism disturbance resilience social–ecological system exhibits moderate coupling accompanied by mild dysfunctional coordination (C = 0.49, D = 0.35). Major bottlenecks include fragile volunteer capacity, incomplete conservation livelihood feedback loops, and tourism-induced sociocultural pressures. This “science-led-local-participation-cultural-tourism-integration” practical model has obtained both domestic and international recognition. Targeted adaptive management measures are further proposed to support community-based intertidal biodiversity conservation across the Asia-Pacific region.

The spotted seal (Phoca largha), a Class I Protected Species in China, relies on Liaodong Bay as its primary breeding habitat in China. In field surveys conducted within the ice-covered zones of Liaodong Bay during January-February 2025, we recorded spotted-seal occurrence records and applied the MaxEnt species-distribution model to identify key predictors of breeding-habitat suitability. The model exhibited fair predictive performance with a mean training AUC of 0.778 and mean test AUC of 0.736. Variable-contribution analysis indicated that sea-ice thickness and distance to shipping lanes were the two dominant predictors, followed by zooplankton biomass and distance to the coastline; these four variables together accounted for 88.2% of the total model contribution. Within the effective survey area, suitable breeding habitat covered approximately 1785 km², accounting for 80.9% of the whole domain and mainly concentrated in the central ice zone. Suitable habitats corresponded to adequate sea-ice thickness and appropriate distances from shipping lanes and coastlines, whereas unsuitable habitat patches (421 km², 19.1%) were distributed in marginal zones limited by thin sea ice or high human-disturbance risk. Jackknife tests confirmed that sea-ice thickness was the most influential single environmental variable. Our results demonstrate that physical sea-ice properties constitute the primary driver for spotted-seal breeding-habitat selection. Human disturbance originating from vessel navigation imposes obvious constraints on habitat use, while seawater-related factors may exert indirect effects by mediating prey-resource distribution. This field-based study provides scientific support for targeted conservation and management of spotted-seal winter breeding habitats in Liaodong Bay.

Research at the interface of biodiversity conservation, urban forestry, and urban green space spans ecology, forestry, landscape planning, environmental management, and public health, making its intellectual structure difficult to apprehend through narrative review alone. This study maps a corpus of 3747 documents published from 2006 to 17 August 2026, retrieved from the OpenAlex API on 13 October 2026 after integrity checking and deduplication. Performance analysis, country-level collaboration networks, lexical co-occurrence on titles and abstracts (abstract coverage 82.6% after supplementation), strategic mapping, thematic evolution, co-citation, and bibliographic coupling were computed with scripts released with the article; stochastic community partitions were evaluated over 200 seeded runs. Across the complete years 2006–2025, retrieved annual output increased at a compound annual rate of 15.89%. The corpus spans 1316 journals and affiliations in 124 countries. China leads publication output, whereas Germany and the USA occupy the strongest brokerage positions in the collaboration network. Author-derived text resolves six lexical clusters (modularity = 0.442), in which health and planning vocabulary joins climate and green-infrastructure terms and carbon vocabulary joins tree and plant species, and co-citation of the 200 most cited references identifies six communities (modularity = 0.507). More than half of the corpus (54.9%) enters only through green-space terms, and removing these documents changes the lexical partition substantially; a replica of a prior green-space mapping shows that urban-forestry terms distinguish the corpus. The mapped literature is increasingly connected to climate, health, and planning agendas.