Search Results (1,601)

In resource-poor sandy habitats, alien plant co-invasion often triggers intense belowground competition mediated by rhizosphere microorganisms. However, the mechanisms by which these plants overcome nutrient limitations remain unclear. Here, we conducted an eight-month in situ monitoring of single- and co-invasion plots of Solanum rostratum and Cenchrus pauciflorus Benth. in the Horqin Sandy Land. By integrating soil enzyme assays with 16S rRNA and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) amplicon sequencing, we characterized their rhizosphere microbial community assembly. Co-invasion exposed both species to convergent biotic stress, characterized by the significant enrichment of the pathogenic fungi Didymella and Pseudogymnoascus (linear discriminant analysis (LDA) > 4.0). To mitigate these pressures, the dominant competitor, S. rostratum, specifically recruited a cross-kingdom phosphate-solubilizing consortium comprising Bacillus and Penicillium (LDA > 4.0). This targeted recruitment significantly enhanced rhizosphere activities, increasing phosphatase and sucrase to 86.10 U/g and 2.17 U/g, respectively, thereby maintaining available phosphorus at a high level (35.55 mg/kg). Conversely, the subordinate competitor, C. pauciflorus, lost key native stress-resistant bacteria such as Rubrobacter (relative abundance dropping from 5.39% to 3.27%) and failed to recruit effective microbes, leading to the rapid depletion of available phosphorus (dropping to 21.38 mg/kg). Ultimately, under dual nutrient and pathogenic stress, the precise recruitment and functional integration of cross-kingdom phosphate-solubilizing microbes are strongly linked to the divergent belowground competitive outcomes between these co-invading plants. Full article

Shallow eutrophic lakes recover from nutrient loading on time scales ranging from less than one year to many decades, yet whether this range is set by the lake or by the biological response group has rarely been quantified within a single monitoring framework. We assembled a five-year (2020–2025) quarterly monitoring panel from three shallow Yangtze-floodplain lakes (Lake Changhu, Lake Liangzihu, and Lake Honghu; 15 stations, 21 quarters) and applied a panel mixed-effect distributed lag model (PME-DLM) to estimate the lag-response windows of phytoplankton and benthic macroinvertebrate densities against five water-quality drivers. Cross-lake consistency was tested with a station-resampled bootstrap, and the contributions of water quality, season, and lake identity to community variation were resolved by three-table variation partitioning. The PME-DLM resolved a 3-month temperature window for phytoplankton and 9–15 month chlorophyll a and temperature windows for benthic communities, while total nitrogen and total phosphorus were non-significant in either group. Cross-lake bootstrap intervals on window width overlapped substantially across the three lakes, whereas cross-group differences in window centre and shape were an order of magnitude greater. Variation partitioning further showed a mirror-image structure in which phytoplankton variation was dominated by the pure water-quality fraction (12.2%) and benthic variation by the water-quality × season joint fraction (5.8%). Within the resolution of this five-year, three-lake panel, group-level differences in lag-response time scale were more apparent than lake-level differences and provide a quantitative basis for matching restoration assessment cadence to pelagic versus benthic recovery. Full article

Frequent engineering changes in manufacturing require worker instructions to be updated quickly and reliably. In many production environments, however, update handling still depends on manual comparison procedures, delayed communication, or repeated traversal of large document collections, limiting responsiveness during ongoing production changes. This paper presents a hierarchical hash-based method for change detection in structured manufacturing documents as the computational core of a worker assistance system for near-real-time instruction updates in the context of in-line qualification. Heterogeneous instruction data are transformed into canonical hierarchical document structures, from which SHA-512 digests are generated at multiple structural levels. During repeated comparison operations, document-state evaluation is reduced to digest comparison, while structural differences can be localized through hierarchical refinement of affected substructures. The method is integrated into a system architecture that combines predecessor-linked version management with role-specific filtering for controlled dissemination of relevant instruction updates. The approach was implemented in an automotive assembly use case involving structured work instructions and evolving production documentation. The evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach reduces repeated comparison effort relative to conventional field-wise traversal methods while maintaining the ability to localize structural changes through hierarchical refinement. The reported results focus on computational behavior and implementation feasibility in structured manufacturing environments rather than hardware-specific throughput benchmarks. Overall, the results indicate that hierarchical comparison of structured instruction states provides a practical basis for change-aware worker assistance and controlled propagation of instruction updates in evolving manufacturing environments. The evaluation focuses on repeated-comparison scenarios in structured manufacturing settings and does not address semantic interpretation of detected changes or large-scale distributed deployments. Full article

A central goal in ecology is to understand whether community assembly follows deterministic rules or is of a stochastic nature. Although species co-occurrence is extensively documented and studied for vertebrates, applying these frameworks to soil Collembola communities in Mediterranean riparian systems provides essential comparative data for community assembly theory. This study examined soil Collembola communities in the Nestos River delta (Greece) across diverse seasons and habitats using thirty-two presence–absence matrices based on abundance data for fifty-four species. These were analyzed using several metrics, each with appropriate randomization algorithms. We studied these metrics across seasons to track community structure changes over time. Additionally, the use of an appropriate multivariate method quantified the influence of soil humidity, while seasonal variations in biomass and diversity were tracked to explore biotic and abiotic influences. In most cases, null hypotheses about the forces structuring these communities could not be rejected, although some instances suggested competitively structured communities. Overall, soil humidity was found to modestly influence community structure, while concordant seasonal trends among biomass and diversity suggest that environmental filtering and biotic interactions shape the observed patterns, with temporal dynamics appearing relatively consistent across habitats within the study year. Full article

Phytoplankton communities in the proposed water source area of the Western Route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project showed multi-level responses across monitoring-period groups and diversion areas. Based on 64 valid samples, total biomass ranged from 0.027 to 5.659 mg L⁻¹ and showed no consistent differences between monitoring-period groups or diversion areas, indicating site- and sampling-period-scale patchiness. Among the dominant biomass-contributing taxa, most were diatom taxa, and the relative contributions of the top ten dominant taxa and Other taxa were reorganized among monitoring-period–area combinations. NMDS, PERMANOVA, and PERMDISP showed that monitoring period was significantly associated with community structure, whereas diversion-area effects were not significant. dbRDA indicated significant environmental–spatial constraints on community composition, with an adjusted explanatory power of 28.2%; T, NH₄⁺–N, TN, NO₃⁻–N, EC, pH, DO, and DTN were significant predictors. VPA showed stronger pure environmental than pure spatial effects, while DDR and EDR revealed significant geographic and environmental distance relationships. Taxonomic Bray–Curtis null models suggested a predominance of stochastic-like taxonomic turnover signatures, with stronger deterministic-like deviations in the upper-line diversion area. GAM identified NH₄⁺–N, DO, and EC as significant biomass predictors. These findings support integrating biomass, community composition, measured physicochemical variables, and taxonomic assembly signatures into sustainability-oriented phytoplankton monitoring for high-elevation riverine water source areas, thereby providing ecological evidence for sustainable water source protection and adaptive management. Full article

Soil depth and habitat degradation can reshape fungal communities in salt-affected wetlands, but their effects on fungal ecological processes remain insufficiently understood. This study examined soil fungi in the Halahai Provincial Nature Reserve and adjacent converted farmland in the western Songnen Plain, Northeast China, where salt-affected meadow soils correspond mainly to Solonetz. Four habitat types—reed wetland, meadow steppe, degraded Suaeda saline patch, and converted farmland—were sampled at 0–20 cm and 20–40 cm soil depths. Soil properties, fungal diversity, taxonomic composition, environmental associations, niche breadth, assembly processes, and FUNGuild-based trophic modes were analyzed using ITS sequencing. Degraded Suaeda soils showed the strongest salinity–alkalinity stress, with pH values of 10.34–10.30 and electrical conductivity of 1.70–1.75 dS·m⁻¹. Fungal richness was highest in surface-converted farmland, with a Sobs value of 423.33, and lowest in deeper degraded Suaeda soil, with a Sobs value of 86.00. Ascomycota dominated most groups, especially degraded Suaeda soils, where its relative abundance reached 75.29–76.80%. ANOSIM confirmed significant community dissimilarity among habitat-depth groups (R = 0.56878, p = 0.001). Specialists accounted for 68.07% of fungal taxa, and stochastic processes, especially drift and dispersal limitation, contributed substantially to assembly. These results indicate that soil depth, salinity–alkalinity, and habitat conversion jointly regulate fungal community structure and ecological processes in degraded soda saline–alkali wetlands. Full article

Crop residue management strongly influences soil microbial communities, yet the mechanisms by which it regulates microbial co-occurrence network assembly across soil profiles remain poorly understood. Here, we investigated the effects of three straw management practices—no straw return (CK), straw burning (BS), and deep plowing with straw incorporation (DPS)—on soil physicochemical properties, microbial diversity, and co-occurrence network structure across multiple soil depths in a Mollisol of Northeast China. By integrating high-throughput sequencing, network analysis, and structural equation modeling (SEM), we explored the correlative relationships associated with microbial network assembly. DPS significantly correlates with higher soil organic carbon content, nutrient availability, and moisture content, particularly in subsoil layers. Under DPS, we obtained more complex and robust microbial networks characterized by higher connectivity and clustering. In contrast, under BS, we found reduced network complexity and stability. SEM may suggest the presence of distinct assembly mechanisms between microbial groups: bacterial network structure models responded to soil physicochemical properties, suggesting strong environmental filtering, whereas shifts in fungal network structures correlate with alpha diversity, highlighting the importance of biotic regulation. Notably, under the evaluated conditions, beta diversity was positively associated with network structural attributes across both groups, indicating potential links between community compositional variation and microbial co-occurrence patterns. These findings suggest that straw incorporation may be associated with shifts in microbial co-occurrence network attributes under the evaluated field conditions. However, the observed relationships are primarily correlative and based on statistical modeling approaches. The underlying ecological mechanisms linking soil properties, microbial diversity, and network structure require further validation through controlled biochemical, physiological, and experimental studies. This study provides additional ecological insights into soil microbial responses to residue management and highlights the potential role of residue management in shaping microbial network stability under the evaluated field conditions. Full article

There is a substantial demand for lightweight, low-profile, and conformal antenna integration on the wing platforms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This paper presents an S-band (2–4 GHz) flexible conformal metasurface array antenna based on a highly conductive graphene-assembled film (GAF). The main contributions of this work are twofold. First, flexible and highly conductive GAF is used as the conductor together with a flexible polyimide (PI) dielectric substrate to form a GAF-based wing-conformal antenna configuration with a low-profile, lightweight, and easily conformal performance. Second, a GAF conformal antenna element is developed by combining a dipole antenna with a directive and reflective frequency selective surface (FSS), achieving effective control of the beam and stable directional radiation at 2.4 GHz. Full-wave simulations using CST Studio Suite show that the directive FSS narrows the feed beam, whereas the reflective FSS redirects and narrows the H-plane radiation. The simulated results show that the integrated wing-conformal antenna operates over 2.19–2.65 GHz and achieves a gain of 4.65 dBi at 2.4 GHz. The measurement results indicate that the GAF conformal antenna and 1 × 4 GAF conformal array antenna shows measured reflection coefficients below $-10$ dB at 2.4 GHz and effective adjacent-element isolation. In addition, simulated results indicate that the GAF array antenna can perform beam scanning within the ±40° range, verifying the beam-control capability of this structure for UAV forward communication. Overall, this work highlights the feasibility of using GAF as a conductive material for both a high-efficiency radiator and an FSS beamforming structure, offering a practical material and design approach for lightweight, low-profile, and wing-conformal airborne array antennas. Full article

As cultural heritage representation increasingly shifts toward immersive and spatial experiences, mixed reality (MR) has emerged as an embodied medium for combining real settings with virtual content. However, numerous existing cultural scenarios remain site-specific and difficult to reconfigure or transfer across contexts. To address this limitation, this study proposes a prototype-based framework. Using traditional Chinese opera as a case study, the generative approach translates the representative graphics into parametric geometries and embeds them in two modular systems: block and panel. Through MR overlay, the modules were fabricated as physical prototypes and integrated with interactive cultural elements. To evaluate the framework, deployment and user testing were conducted in Portugal and Italy. The experimental results show that the framework supports rapid assembly, flexible spatial transformation, and digital access while retaining the prototype structure. Participants’ feedback indicates positive usability, favorable experiential responses, and increased interest associated with opera engagement. Overall, the study demonstrates the adaptive potential of parametric modular aggregation for facilitating deployable MR experiences, contributing a methodological reference for cultural communication. Full article

Spent mushroom substrate (SMS) return is a vital strategy for agricultural waste recycling and soil fertility improvement, yet its ecological impacts of duration remain poorly understood. This study employed metagenomic sequencing to explore soil fertility, microbial dynamics, and nitrogen cycling across different SMS return durations (0, 1, and 3 years) within rice–mushroom crop rotation systems. Soil nutrients (organic matter, total nitrogen, total phosphorus) initially decreased and then increased throughout the rice growth cycle. The one-year return (y1) induced early nutrient depletion, whereas the three-year return (y3) significantly enhanced late-stage nutrient accumulation. With increasing duration, bacterial and archaeal assembly shifted from stochastic toward deterministic processes, while fungal diversity and stochasticity decreased continuously. Co-occurrence network analysis demonstrated that SMS return increased network complexity and intercommunity competition. This transition was accompanied by a functional shift in keystone taxa from those responsive to exogenous organic matter in y1 to those mediating nitrogen fixation, anammox, and sulfur metabolism in y3. Nitrogen cycling in y1 increased potential N₂O emission risks through nirS upregulation and nosZ downregulation, whereas y3 mitigated inorganic nitrogen loss by upregulating gene abundances of ammonia assimilation, nitrification, and DNRA genes. Notably, the structure of nitrogen-cycling genes fluctuated in y1 but was resilient to y0 levels in y3. These findings demonstrated that while initial SMS return triggered ecological fluctuations and environmental risks, continuous return (y3) achieved functional stability by reshaping microbial niches. This study highlights the importance of SMS return duration in balancing soil fertility enhancement with environmental risk mitigation in sustainable paddy ecosystems. Full article

Cordyceps militaris is a well-known edible and medicinal entomopathogenic fungus that can be cultivated using silkworm larvae as hosts. However, no reports have been found regarding the gut microbiota of silkworms (Bombyx mori) following C. militaris injection. Based on three biological replicates, illumina 16S rRNA gene sequencing was used to investigate the changes over time in the gut bacteria and fungi of silkworms injected with C. militaris. The results indicated that following inoculation with C. militaris, the abundance of Bacillales and Basidiomycetes increased, while that of Pseudomonadales and Ascomycetes decreased. The abundance of Mammaliicoccus increased by 78% and 26% in dying silkworms compared to their pre-inoculated counterparts and blank control group, respectively. The relative abundance of Rhodotorula in dying silkworms was 2.89-fold and 80.51-fold higher than that in the pre-inoculation group and blank control group, respectively. After inoculation with C. militaris, fungi showed the greatest community variations at day 2, while bacteria displayed the most distinct differences at day 4. Under C. militaris infection, the abundance of all four pathways of Genetic Information Processing in silkworm larvae’s gut microbiota significantly increased. Taken together, the results demonstrate that inoculation with C. militaris induced significant alterations in the composition, structure, assembly, and predictive functional profiles of gut bacteria and fungi in silkworms. This study provides a theoretical basis for exploring the production of C. militaris using silkworm larvae as insect hosts. Full article

Background and Objectives: Patient safety at hospital interfaces is shaped by organisational fragility, ethical obligations, and anticipated legal exposure. Reporting, disclosure, and speaking up have been studied separately, yet the way these pressures converge in ordinary hospital work remains insufficiently described. Materials and Methods: We conducted a qualitative study in a public hospital in Romania using semi-structured episodic interviews and the critical incident technique. Twelve clinicians participated: six nurses and six physicians working in intensive care, emergency medicine, general surgery, paediatrics, oncology day care, anaesthesia, obstetrics, and internal medicine/cardiology. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim in Romanian, anonymised, and analysed with the framework method from a critical realist perspective. A secondary cross-case coding of all 12 episodes was used for descriptive analytic displays. Results: Four mechanisms organised the material. First, local stop rules and cross-checks created temporary stability at fragile interfaces such as high-alert medication, patient identification, specimen labelling, and transfer documentation. Second, consent and confidentiality were repeatedly compressed by urgency, compromised capacity, public space, and family pressure; legitimacy depended on explicit reasoning rather than documentary completion alone. Third, speaking-up and near-miss reporting were governed by protocol-backed legitimacy, leader response, and the informal cost of interruption. Formal incident reporting was present in one episode, partial in one, and absent in 10. Fourth, documentation and disclosure redistributed accountability. Notes that recorded reasoning supported continuity of care, whereas protective opacity concealed near misses, infrastructural weakness, and interactional pressure. Documentation or disclosure pressure appeared in all 12 episodes. Conclusions: Safety in everyday hospital work was assembled through local barriers, moral triage, and selective visibility. Interface redesign, protected near-miss reporting, psychologically safe escalation, and structured support for urgent consent and post-incident communication would make transparent safety work more sustainable. Trustworthiness was strengthened through reflexive memoing by the physician-interviewer, an audit trail of coding decisions, comparison across professional groups, active attention to negative cases, and iterative assessment of meaning saturation at the level of explanatory mechanisms. Full article

Urbanization can act as a powerful ecological filter, restructuring biodiversity through species loss, replacement, and altered resource pathways. While urban green spaces (UGS) are recognized as potential biodiversity refuges, the effectiveness and mechanisms for conserving insect diversity across the urban-to-natural gradient remain poorly understood. Here, we combine full-season Malaise trapping (April–November) with MinION-based DNA barcoding to test two predictions about how urbanization reshapes Diptera communities across five sites in Haidian District, Beijing, ranging from residential areas and urban parks to a nearby shallow mountain reserve (BWM). Based on 5528 barcoded individuals, we identified 686 putative species from 39 families. As predicted, β-diversity between urban and mountain sites was overwhelmingly driven by species turnover rather than nestedness, demonstrating that cities do not simply receive subsets of the surrounding fauna but actively reassemble communities. This filtering effect was, however, trophic-guild specific. Detritivores showed the highest replacement, consistent with a shift from natural to anthropogenic resource subsidies, while predators/parasitoids exhibited significant nested loss, aligning with their hypothesized sensitivity at higher trophic levels. Vegetation structure further clarified these patterns: vegetation density, not plant species richness, was the primary bottom-up driver for herbivore and predator/parasitoid diversity, whereas detritivores were decoupled from living plant biomass. These findings demonstrate that urban and near-natural habitats maintain distinct species pools via guild-specific assembly pathways, highlighting the need for guild-specific conservation strategies for urban biodiversity conservation. Extending beyond compositional analysis, we propose a temporal-abundance framework, classifying species by persistence and abundance, as a diagnostic tool for assessing ecological integrity and guiding conservation in urbanizing landscapes. Full article

Mediterranean phryganic ecosystems have been shaped for centuries by recurrent herbivory, yet the long-term ecological consequences of grazing cessation remain insufficiently resolved, particularly in protected island landscapes where conservation management often assumes that exclusion promotes recovery. In these drylands, the removal of grazing redirect assembly processes through shifts in dominance, heterogeneity, and functional strategy expression. Here, we use more than three decades-long grazing discontinuity within the Petrified Forest of Lesvos, an insular Mediterranean geopark, to examine how long-term herbivore exclusion reorganizes plant communities across taxonomic and functional dimensions. By integrating floristic inventories, multivariate community analysis, mixed-effects modeling, indicator species analysis, and community-weighted trait approaches, we reconstruct the ecological signature of grazing release in phryganic ecosystems. Long-term exclusion was associated with a broader species pool and a greater representation of protected taxa, while ungrazed communities exhibited lower Shannon and Simpson diversity, greater compositional dispersion, and a marked shift in dominance structure linked to the expansion of Sarcopoterium spinosum. Community differentiation was accompanied by directional reorganization of functional trait structure, with ungrazed plots characterized by taller vegetation and increased leaf and inflorescence length, indicating release from recurrent biomass removal and a transition toward more structurally expansive strategies. These results show that grazing exclusion does not simply enhance biodiversity, but reorganizes Mediterranean plant communities into an alternative ecological state shaped by altered competitive hierarchies, shrub-mediated filtering, and relaxed herbivory. In disturbance-structured island ecosystems, therefore, the ecological outcomes of protection depend not only on whether grazing is removed, but on how strongly community organization has historically depended on its continued presence. Full article

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can improve plant performance, but how they coordinately influence root metabolism and associated bacterial communities in sweet potato remains unclear. Here, a pot experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of Glomus intraradices inoculation on sweet potato seedlings by integrating analyses of rhizosphere soil properties, plant growth and nutrient uptake, root metabolomics, and rhizosphere and endophytic bacterial communities using 16S rRNA gene sequencing with FAPROTAX-based functional prediction. AMF inoculation significantly increased whole-plant fresh and dry biomass, potassium concentration and accumulation, and the accumulation of starch and water-soluble carbohydrates, while no significant effects were observed on dry matter rate or plant nitrogen and phosphorus concentration. In the rhizosphere, AMF reduced soil electrical conductivity and increased organic matter content without significantly affecting pH, alkali-hydrolyzable nitrogen, available phosphorus, or available potassium. Root metabolomic profiling identified 289 differential metabolites, with enrichment of phenylpropanoid biosynthesis, glycerophospholipid metabolism, porphyrin metabolism, and nucleotide metabolism, together with broad up-regulation of lipid-related metabolites. Bacterial communities showed strong compartment specificity, with the root endosphere displaying lower alpha diversity than the rhizosphere. Higher rhizosphere bacterial Shannon diversity was observed in the AMF treatment, together with compartment-dependent shifts in bacterial community composition; enrichment of endophytic taxa such as Devosia and Niastella was detected following AMF inoculation. Functional prediction further suggested niche differentiation between rhizosphere and endophytic bacteria, together with AMF-associated shifts in carbon- and nitrogen-related functions. Overall, these results suggest that G. intraradices inoculation is associated with enhanced sweet potato growth and enhanced potassium and carbohydrate accumulation in association with coordinated changes in rhizosphere conditions, root metabolism, and bacterial community assembly. Full article