Search Results (9,312)

Farmland ecosystems provide multiple ecosystem functions and ecosystem services and underpin regional ecological security and integrity. Despite substantial progress in FESFS research, integrated syntheses linking ecological mechanisms, multiple ecosystem service interactions, and management-oriented service enhancement remain limited. This review synthesized global advances in FESFS and evaluated their implications for farmland ecosystems developed through karst desertification control. Following the PRISMA framework, Web of Science records published through 31 December 2025 were systematically identified, screened, and assessed for eligibility, and 371 studies were analyzed using bibliometrix and structured evidence synthesis. Publication output increased rapidly after 2014, accompanied by a shift from production-oriented research toward multifunctionality, ecosystem service interactions, and integrated management. The evidence synthesis identified three interrelated areas of progress: structure–function–service relationships in farmland ecosystems, ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies, and ecosystem function optimization and ecosystem service enhancement. Based on the bibliometric findings, evidence synthesis, and karst-specific environmental constraints, we identified four priorities for KDCFES: water–nutrient coupling and vulnerability thresholds, biodiversity and functional complementarity, ecosystem service trade-offs and multifunctionality, and the translation of ecosystem function optimization into service enhancement. These priorities provide a sound basis for strengthening ecological resilience and supporting sustainable livelihoods. Full article

An age-friendly built environment surrounding healthcare facilities can support older adults’ healthcare use and everyday activities. Existing studies have paid limited attention to the built environment surrounding healthcare facilities as an integrated setting. This study developed a healthcare-facility-centered framework to assess the age-friendly built environment in Fuzhou, China. Using GIS-based spatial analysis and multisource data, 3781 healthcare facilities were assessed across six dimensions: greenness exposure, health services, daily living services, social and leisure opportunities, healthcare accessibility, and functional mix. Questionnaire responses from 94 older-adult cases, including self-reports and caregiver-proxy reports, were used to derive dimension weights using the Entropy Weight Method (EWM). Three main findings emerged: (1) Higher-level healthcare facilities and more favorable integrated scores were concentrated in central urban areas, although spatial patterns varied across dimensions, particularly for greenness exposure, healthcare accessibility, and functional mix; (2) Level 3 healthcare facilities (L3HFs) had the highest median integrated score (0.613), compared with 0.345 for ungraded healthcare facilities (UHFs); and (3) 55.3% of respondents reported combining healthcare visits with shopping or leisure activities, while daily living services received the highest weight (26.4%). The uneven distribution of questionnaire responses across administrative areas may limit the representativeness of the perception-based assessment. The proposed framework can inform targeted improvements around healthcare facilities and support age-friendly planning in other cities. Full article

The ferrosilicon and metallic silicon smelting industry produces tens of millions of tons of silica fume (SF) solid waste cumulatively. The stockpiling of SF has caused prominent ecological and environmental problems, while its high-value silicon resources remain underdeveloped. Silicon-based materials derived from SF via alkaline extraction and controlled functionalization show great potential for valorization. This review systematically discussed the physicochemical characteristics and pretreatment activation mechanisms of SF, elaborated process regulation rules for typical preparation routes including alkaline leaching, sol–gel, template-directed synthesis, hydrothermal, and microwave-assisted methods, and analyzed the coupled effects of key parameters such as pH, template/surfactant ratio, and aging conditions on pore structure, morphology, and surface chemical properties. It also summarized research progress and engineering exploration in environmental remediation, including heavy metal adsorption, organic pollutant removal, and CO₂ capture. Current research still faces several practical limitations, including raw material impurity fluctuations, synthesis scale-up obstacles, insufficient understanding of multi-scale pollutant removal mechanisms and incomplete long-term service evaluation under complex conditions. Future efforts should deepen thermodynamic and kinetic analyses of material preparation and conversion, as well as material–pollutant interfacial interactions. Quantitative evaluation systems should also be established for long-term performance and low-carbon resource benefits under actual working conditions. Furthermore, multi-condition coupled intelligent preparation and performance regulation technologies should be developed and the transition from laboratory fundamental research toward engineering, quantitative, and intelligent applications should be promoted. This review could provide a theoretical basis and technical reference for the high-value resource utilization of SF and potentially low-carbon environmental remediation. Full article

Appropriate wheelchairs are essential for mobility and participation, but their benefits depend on device suitability, user training, maintenance, and accessible environments. This mixed-methods study examined wheelchair provision, functionality, accessibility barriers, and factors associated with reported independent wheelchair use in Albania. Survey data from 807 respondents, including 662 wheelchair users and 145 family proxy respondents, were integrated with five focus group discussions involving 40 wheelchair users. The primary outcome was self- or proxy-reported independent wheelchair use, assessed using a single Yes/No questionnaire item. Among respondents with valid outcome data, 30.9% reported independent wheelchair use. Most wheelchairs were folding models (80.6% of respondents with valid wheelchair-type data). In the complete-case multivariable model (n = 538), wheelchair-use training (OR = 2.14, 95% CI [1.34, 3.42]), wheelchair functionality (OR = 1.41, 95% CI [1.14, 1.76]), ramp access (OR = 3.41, 95% CI [2.10, 5.54]), and male gender (OR = 2.19, 95% CI [1.38, 3.46]) were associated with independent use; maintenance services showed a smaller association (OR = 1.56, 95% CI [1.02, 2.40]). Sensitivity analyses, including multiple imputation and analyses restricted to direct respondents or the two predominant wheelchair types, supported the principal associations. The findings should be interpreted as sample-specific associations rather than causal or population-level estimates and support continued attention to structured wheelchair services, user training, and accessible environments. Full article

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Digital Twins require persistent geospatial infrastructures that connect semantic, spatial, temporal, environmental, road-reference, and 3D urban information across simulation and visualization. This study proposes a database-centered framework integrating PostGIS-managed Operational Design Domain (ODD) layers, runtime telemetry, CityGML-based 3D context, an XODR-derived road reference, live environmental observations, and service-mediated delivery through CARLA, FastAPI/WebSocket, Mission Control, and Cesium. Evaluation comprised 30 Route A runs across six background-vehicle densities (0–40) with five paired-seed repetitions per density, plus five Route B repetitions for cross-route functional repeatability. Route A generated 174,214 source states and achieved 100% database-write success, with mean run-level write latency of 1.950 ± 0.055 ms. Mean REST V2V round-trip time increased from 1.388 ms at BG = 0 to 2.379 ms at BG = 40, while background-actor population maintenance averaged 99.975% across nonzero-density runs. Multi-layer ODD overlap occurred in 10.55% of Route A states, with up to three simultaneous contexts. All evaluated road-reference states remained internally ON TRACK under the implementation-specific diagnostic. Route B reproduced the core persistence, semantic, spatial, and traceability functions under a distinct route-exposure pattern. These results support the framework as a reproducible geospatial backbone for AV-DT simulation and analysis within the tested simulation and hardware conditions. Full article

The pedagogical value of play-based learning is well established, yet its effectiveness depends on contextual factors such as play type, educators’ perspectives, and their language use. In the background of China’s curriculum transformation, this study examines 28 early childhood educators’ perspectives on play-based learning and their language use during free and structured play. Interviews identified two perspectives on the relationship between play and learning: interdependent (19) and independent (9). Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, educators’ speech functions were analyzed in terms of how speakers give or demand information and goods & services, expressed through statement, question, command, and offer. Findings showed that language use differed across play contexts: while offers were rare in both, free play featured a balanced use of statements, questions, and commands, whereas structured play was marked by a greater use of statements and commands. Educators’ perspectives were also associated with their language choices. In structured play, educators with an interdependent perspective used significantly more statements than those with an independent perspective. In free play, educators with an interdependent perspective used questions and commands within role-play scenarios to extend children’s play experiences, whereas those with an independent perspective tended to use confirmatory questions outside the play scenario to direct children’s attention. These findings underscore the importance of recognizing how play type, educators’ perspectives, and language use interact and may provide children with different learning opportunities in play-based contexts. Full article

This study conducts a scenario-based analysis of the potential economic impacts of an eruption of Mount Fuji across Japan’s urban systems, with a particular focus on the infrastructure services that support urban functions. Using a dynamic interregional input–output model, the analysis incorporates direct damages from multiple volcanic hazards—including ashfall, lava flows, and pyroclastic flow—as well as indirect economic damage propagated through supply chains and infrastructure constraints. We classify Japan’s regions into six categories based on damage intensity and urban functional characteristics. The results reveal a three-layered impact structure comprising: (1) effects arising from physical damage in regions close to the volcano, (2) large-scale but short-term functional disruptions in the metropolitan core due to infrastructure failures, and (3) widespread indirect effects propagated through interregional economic linkages. In terms of absolute economic losses, we find the metropolitan core exerts a dominant influence, with transportation, and service sectors playing particularly critical roles. Our findings hold important policy implications for enhancing the resilience of Japan’s urban systems and ensuring infrastructure redundancy, and offer a useful modeling approach to assessing the risk of volcanic disasters. Full article

Higher education in health professions often faces a pedagogical disconnect between theoretical basic science instruction and the development of clinical empathy, social responsibility, and interprofessional competencies. To address this gap, this study evaluated a campus-based living laboratory model integrating service-learning and therapeutic horticulture into preclinical health curricula to foster active knowledge construction and inclusive community engagement. A single-cohort, post-intervention pilot evaluation within a qualitative-driven, convergent mixed-methods action-research pilot study was implemented with pharmacy students (N = 19) collaborating alongside physiotherapy peers and local organizations supporting individuals with cerebral palsy and psychological functional diversity (ASPACE and Inclusión Activa). Academic evaluation data showed that 89.5% of participating pharmacy students (n = 17/19) achieved high-performance marks (≥7.0/10.0) in Pharmacognosy assessment components addressing plant identification and secondary metabolite biosynthesis. Qualitative triangulation identified six core themes: applied learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, teamwork, social engagement, instructor impact, and overcoming fear. Interprofessional activities were co-designed with physiotherapy peers, while pharmacy students reported enhanced adaptive communication and clinical translation abilities. Embedding inclusive living laboratories within health curricula may offer a scalable approach that warrants further multi-cohort and multi-institutional evaluation to connect abstract scientific theory with human-centered healthcare practice. Full article

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) determine whether a sample was used to train a target model. Existing attacks often require abundant auxiliary data or many reference models, which may be unavailable in restricted services. We propose a meta-learning-based few-shot MIA for black-box interfaces returning only ranked Top-K probabilities. Shadow-model responses form episodic tasks for a relation network; at inference, ten known target members are aggregated as support and compared with each query. Across six directed dataset–architecture transfers, descriptive mean AUCs range from 0.8115 to 0.9471. In the primary Mini-ImageNet/ResNet-18 to CIFAR-100/ViT-B/16 transfer, three independent target/relation-network pipelines achieve an AUC of $0.9444\pm 0.0061$ and a TPR of $0.0998\pm 0.0455$ at 1% FPR. Performance is competitive with raw Top-1 ($0.9435\pm 0.0036$) and few-shot-fine-tuned Shokri ($0.9420\pm 0.0022$), with no uniform dominance. Reducing the target’s member–held-out accuracy gap from 77.17 to 18.53 percentage points lowers AUC to $0.6038\pm 0.0094$. Support and relation-function controls also vary by initialization. Thus, ranked Top-K outputs can leak membership information, particularly for overfitted targets, while learned support conditioning provides no universal advantage. Full article

Cyber-enabled fraud can move victim funds from social or messaging platforms into banks, virtual-asset service providers, self-hosted wallets, cross-chain services and offshore venues before a report becomes effective preservation or restraint. This article asks why prevention and recovery can fail even when formally capable guardians exist at successive institutional nodes. It develops guardianship handoff failure (GHF) as a transition-level criminological mechanism: a handoff fails when a relevant downstream guardian exists or can lawfully be activated, but the information, attribution, legally usable authority or intervention capacity needed for that guardian’s function is not preserved, transmitted, recognised or activated within the relevant temporal window. GHF is distinguished from the absence of guardianship, substantive gaps in legal power and lawful non-intervention. Using a structured comparative socio-legal design and a crime-script-informed sequence, the study examines seven recurrent handoff zones in Hong Kong and South Korea to a legal cut-off of 30 September 2026. The analysis identifies four non-exclusive discontinuities—observability, attribution, authority and intervention—and derives four propositions for later empirical testing. The comparison illustrates conditions consistent with the proposition that denser regulatory coverage may increase coordination dependence, without estimating causal effects on victim loss or recovery. A victim-centred architecture is proposed that separates evidence preservation, temporary restriction, public restraint, adjudication and return while emphasising accessible reporting, provenance, bounded escalation, correction and protection against secondary victimisation. Full article

Forest-steppe grasslands are highly important ecosystems because they provide the transition from temperate forests to open steppes. This makes them exceptional from many important perspectives, such as biological diversity, ecological services, gene pools, agroecosystem resources, etc. These are some of the main reasons for the demand for long-term studies on topics such as vegetation succession or climate resilience records, because they can be useful for authorities and entities involved in the restoration of these agroecosystems. The aim of the research is to analyse the sward of a successional ex-arable grassland in the Western Romanian forest-steppe area, managed under an extensive system, using Ecological Indicator Values (EIVs) and their interaction with biodiversity, floristic composition (functional groups) and pastoral value. Data collection began in the ninth year after land abandonment, specifically in 2003. The results of the present research are extended to 21 years, covering the period from 2003 to 2023. The Landolt EIVs considered were the preferences for plant species in soil reaction (R), nutrients (N), soil moisture (F), temperature (T), light (L), and climatic continentality (K). The successional evolution of vegetation was highly complex during the study, highlighting changes in species composition, influenced along the time gradient by changes in biotope conditions. These changes were expressed by the trend of most of the analysed EIVs, respectively, temperature (T), soil moisture (F), soil reaction (R), and nutrients (N). EIVs are a useful tool that offers a more detailed description of a permanent grassland, expressing the evolution of the biotope conditions. Biodiversity was influenced by N and K, and floristic composition mostly by K. Full article

Background/Objectives: Sacubitril/valsartan is a foundational therapy for heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), but real-world implementation extends beyond initiation to laboratory monitoring, follow-up, dose reassessment, and documentation of reasons for sub-target therapy. We evaluated this prescribing pathway in a regional Saudi heart-failure service. Methods: This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study included 296 adults with HFrEF (left ventricular ejection fraction ≤40%) treated at a public referral hospital in Al-Qurayyat, Saudi Arabia, during 2020–2025. Quantitative analyses described active prescription, calendar-period variation, selected physiological caution features among non-users, initiation pathways, early monitoring, follow-up, escalation attempts, and dose status. Fifteen clinicians participated in semi-structured interviews analyzed using the Framework Method and the updated Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research; reporting followed COREQ. Results: Sacubitril/valsartan was active in 239/296 patients (80.7%). Among 57 non-users, 41 (71.9%) had at least one selected physiological caution feature. In 221 treated patients with ≥6 months of follow-up, 75.1% completed renal-function/potassium reassessment within 14 days, 67.9% had follow-up within six weeks, and 60.6% had an escalation attempt within 90 days. Current target-dose use was 16.7%, and 21.7% had reached target at any point. Of 116 patients currently receiving 24/26 mg twice daily, 91 had never been documented above the lowest dose, and 25 had previously reached a higher dose. Reasons for current lowest-dose therapy were clinical/physiological in 49, health-system/access-related in 5, patient preference/adherence-related in 4, and undocumented in 58. Qualitative findings emphasized monitoring continuity, explicit role ownership, appointment access, dose availability, and communication. Conclusions: High ARNI uptake did not ensure complete post-initiation dose reassessment and titration. The clearest measurable gap was uncertainty around current lowest-dose therapy when no reason or reassessment plan was documented; this represents a documentation/reassessment gap rather than proof of inappropriate care. Clinical audit should distinguish target-dose attainment, clinically limited sub-target dosing, active titration, return to a lower dose after prior escalation, access-related barriers, patient preference/adherence, and unresolved sub-target therapy. Full article

Father absence remains a persistent social problem in South Africa and is associated with significant pressures on family functioning, child development and community life. This article further develops Freeks’s concept of missional fatherhood as a faith-based model for strengthening family resilience among father-absent households in South Africa. The study employs an integrative literature review with qualitative thematic synthesis and a concept-development orientation. Missional fatherhood is grounded in the missio Dei and proceeds from the theological conviction that God is a missional and sending God. To understand the concept, mission must be understood in its deepest theological sense: God is the author of mission; God has sent and continues to send; Christ is central to this mission, and the Holy Spirit enables people to participate in the mission of the triune God. Consequently, missional fatherhood is people-oriented rather than institution-oriented or programme-focused. People participate in God’s mission by being sent towards other people, families and communities through responsible presence, sacrificial service, spiritual formation and restorative care. By placing Freeks’s concept in dialogue with missional theology, South African fatherhood scholarship, social fathering, family resilience, relational ecology and Ubuntu, the article further develops the concept as a broader theological and relational response to father absence without diminishing the responsibility of biological fathers. It argues that missional fatherhood offers a theological and relational contribution to addressing father absence by understanding fathering as missional praxis through which people participate in God’s continuing restorative work among families and communities. Full article

Fair allocation in an integrated charging–swapping station depends on both how an event defines value and how evidentiary uncertainty propagates into settlement. Existing vehicle-to-grid (V2G) studies commonly treat contribution attribution and trusted transaction recording as separate problems. We formulate an event-conditioned cooperative game in which service requirements, available capabilities, and a service prior shape the characteristic function before Shapley attribution. An evidence–confidence vector further links measured performance to attributable performance. A calculation-provenance certificate and an evidence–dependency matrix then connect attributed amounts to component-level settlement states under dispute. Under the stated budget and dependency conditions, the formulation establishes conservation and dispute locality. In reproducible synthetic cases, event conditioning produced distinct allocations across three service types and a smaller normalized core deficit than the equal-weight game in $86.4\%$ of sampled events. A position-balanced estimator reduced Shapley RMSE by factors of $2.6$–$3.4$ relative to random sampling and $1.6$–$1.9$ relative to antithetic sampling, although position-stratified sampling remained more accurate. Missing dependency edges released unsupported components, whereas spurious edges froze otherwise releasable amounts. The framework therefore connects event-specific cooperative attribution with evidence-dependent settlement and identifies dependency specification as a first-class condition of dispute-aware V2G revenue allocation. Full article

Manufacturing-cell digital twins increasingly combine independently developed services that can influence shared physical resources. When several state-changing services are individually admissible but request incompatible values for the same control endpoint, runtime governance is required before execution. This work proposes a governance model that represents service–resource bindings, service and resource constraints, runtime context, arbitration-policy bindings, and enforcement relations for composed manufacturing-cell DTs. State-changing requests are evaluated individually before compatible requests are coalesced and incompatible admissible requests are resolved through a resource-specific governance policy. The model is implemented using ODRL for portable policy representation and OPA/Rego for executable runtime decisions. The evaluation examines functional validity, deterministic decision behavior, and request-to-enforcement latency using recorded CNC machining data and controlled replay scenarios in which two DT services share the feedOverride resource. All eight validation scenarios produced the expected decisions, including denial, delay, coalescing, and arbitration, while the simulated enforcement path produced at most one governed write per cycle. The OPA policy round trip showed a median latency of 4.962 ms (p95: 6.709 ms) and the complete governed request-to-enforcement path 15.003 ms (p95: 28.046 ms). The results demonstrate the feasibility of explicit runtime governance for competing DT-service actuation requests in the evaluated manufacturing-cell setting. Full article