Search Results (3,001)

Women in resource-scarce communities navigate daily scarcity, structural neglect, and gendered violence, leaving profound but often invisible impacts on mental and reproductive health. Women play an active role in the Water–Energy–Food (WEF) space; they provide water, food, and household security daily. This study investigates how chronic deprivation across the WEF nexus shapes experiences of psychological distress, reproductive vulnerability, and social marginalization in South African settings: Lorentzville, a migrant urban informal settlement, and Mqanduli, a peri-urban Eastern Cape community. Using ethnographic methods, including in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and participatory observation, and an analytical framework combining structural violence and feminist political ecology, we show that insecurity over water, energy, and food constrains reproductive autonomy, amplifies self-reported symptoms of anxiety and depression, and drives coping and adaptation strategies such as informal work, transactional sex, and fragile social support networks. These strategies, while mitigating immediate risks, cannot fully offset systemic harms. By foregrounding women’s lived experiences, this study extends the WEF nexus framework to include embodied, emotional, and reproductive dimensions, linking historical legacies of colonial and apartheid neglect to contemporary inequities. The findings offer critical insights for integrated health, social, and resource policy interventions that center on gender, care, and justice within environmental, wellbeing, and livelihood. Full article

As a core city in central China and a key node of the Changsha–Zhuzhou–Xiangtan (CZT) Metropolitan Area, Changsha has experienced profound territorial space restructuring amid rapid urbanization and high-quality development. This study focuses on the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics, driving mechanisms, and future optimization paths of production–living–ecological space (PLES) in Changsha, using three key time nodes: 2010, 2020, and 2025. Based on updated land use data (30 m spatial resolution), socioeconomic statistics, and the latest territorial spatial planning policies, we integrated multiple research methods including the land use transfer matrix, dynamic degree model, Logistic regression, and FLUS (Future Land Use Simulation) model. The results reveal the evolutionary law of PLES space from “rapid expansion” (2010–2020) to “quality improvement” (2020–2025) in Changsha and simulate the 2035 PLES layout under three scenarios (natural development, cultivated land protection, and ecological protection) incorporating rigid policy constraints such as urban development boundaries and ecological conservation red lines. This research provides updated scientific support for the coordinated and sustainable development of territorial space in new first-tier cities and metropolitan area cores. Full article

(1) Background: Under the dual pressures of global climate change and rapid urbanization, blue–green infrastructure as a nature-based solution is crucial for enhancing urban sustainability. However, there is still a significant cognitive gap regarding the synergy mechanism between its blue and green components and its nonlinear combined impact on sustainability. (2) Method: To fill this gap, this study takes Zhenjiang, a national sponge pilot city in China, as a case and constructs a comprehensive assessment framework. The framework combines multi-source spatio-temporal big data (remote sensing images, point of interest data, mobile phone signaling data) with spatial analysis techniques (geodetectors, Getis-Ord Gi*) to quantify the synergistic effects of blue–green infrastructure on environmental, economic, and social sustainability. (3) Results: The main findings include the following: (1) urban sustainability presents a spatial differentiation pattern of “high in the center, low in the periphery, and multi-core”, and there is a significant positive spatial correlation with the distribution of blue–green infrastructure. (2) The economic dimension, especially daytime population vitality, contributes the most to overall sustainability. (3) Crucially, the co-configuration of sponge facility density and park facility density was identified as the most influential driving mechanism (q = 0.698). In addition, the interaction between the blue infrastructure and the green sponge facilities showed obvious nonlinear enhancement characteristics. Based on spatial matching analysis, the study area was divided into three priority intervention zones: high, medium, and low. (4) Conclusions: This study confirms that it is crucial to view blue–green infrastructure as an interrelated collaborative system. The findings deepen the theoretical understanding of the synergistic empowerment mechanism of blue–green infrastructure and provide scientifically based and actionable policy support for the precise planning of ecological spaces in high-density urbanized areas. Full article

Urban parks play an increasingly important role in supporting social interaction, ecological services, and everyday well-being in rapidly urbanizing cities, yet prevailing planning practices still rely on equal-provision logics and linear modeling frameworks, implicitly assuming that park vitality increases proportionally with facilities and surrounding services. Such assumptions overlook the possibility that park vitality responds to built-environment factors in nonlinear, threshold-based, and configuration-dependent ways. This study develops an interpretable machine learning approach to identify the nonlinear effects and structural configurations that drive urban park vitality in Changsha, China. We integrate Baidu Huiyan population heat data with AOI-defined park boundaries and multi-source POI indicators to characterize internal facilities and surrounding built-environments for 147 parks in the city’s main urban area. An XGBoost model is trained to predict park vitality, and SHAP values, partial dependence analysis, and bivariate interaction plots are employed to examine variable importance, threshold behaviors, and synergistic or substitutive relationships among key factors. The results show that sports and leisure facilities are the most influential driver of vitality, followed by shopping services and government service facilities. Their impacts are strongly nonlinear: sports and leisure facilities and public amenities display clear saturation thresholds, while high-density shopping services generate substantial gains in vitality only beyond specific concentration levels. Interaction effects further indicate that park vitality emerges from particular configurations of internal facilities and surrounding residential and service environments, rather than from the additive accumulation of isolated factors. These findings demonstrate the value of interpretable machine learning for shifting urban park planning from equal-provision paradigms toward structurally informed configuration strategies and more efficient public space governance. Full article

Exploring the coupling coordination relationship and underlying mechanisms within Production–Living–Ecological Space (PLES) and revealing its spatial interactions are of great significance for promoting the sustainable development of national territorial space. Taking the Beipanjiang River Basin as a case study, this research employs the PLES classification system, the Coupling Coordination Degree (CCD) model, Exploratory Spatiotemporal Data Analysis (ESTDA), and a geodetector to examine the spatiotemporal differentiation patterns and impact mechanisms of PLES coupling coordination from 2010 to 2023 in the karst plateau basin. The results indicate that (1) from 2010 to 2023, the spatial functions of PLES showed significant heterogeneity. Both production and living functions increased gradually, while the ecological function declined slightly. (2) From 2010 to 2020, the coupling degree and coordination level of PLES improved steadily but remained at a low coupling and imbalanced stage overall. From 2020 to 2023, marked growth occurred, though regional disparities persisted. (3) From 2010 to 2023, the overall spatial structure of the CCD of the PLES remained relatively stable, demonstrating significant spatial integration. Regional development exhibited clear path dependence, and the positive spatial correlation effect continued to strengthen. (4) Natural, social, and economic factors jointly influenced the PLES coordination level. Among them, nighttime light intensity, population density, and annual average Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) were key drivers of its spatiotemporal differentiation. Factor interactions showed significant two-factor enhancement and nonlinear enhancement effects. These findings provide a scientific basis for optimizing the PLES in the Beipanjiang River Basin and offer a practical reference for spatial governance and planning in ecologically fragile karst plateau river basins. Full article

Fungi, including yeasts, have played a central role in the development of knowledge about cell physiology and molecular biology as experimental eukaryotic models. However, much of this knowledge has been generated using classical organisms such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which display inherent limitations, as many cellular processes operate under extreme conditions, including high salinity, extreme pH, oxidative stress, exposure to toxic compounds, and temperature fluctuations. In this context, extremophilic and extremotolerant yeasts have emerged as complementary systems with strong potential for basic research and biotechnological applications. This review integrates recent advances in the taxonomic diversity, ecology, physiology, molecular mechanisms, and omics-based analyses of extremophilic yeasts, with a particular focus on how these organisms achieve stress integration through coordinated regulation of signaling pathways, metabolism, and organelle function. We discuss representative applications in environmental toxicology, bioremediation, and industrial bioprocesses, as well as their relevance in the context of climate change and space biotechnology. Finally, we outline key conceptual and methodological challenges and propose future perspectives that position extremophilic yeasts as next-generation eukaryotic models for investigating adaptation as a systems-level, constitutive cellular state under complex and dynamic stress conditions. Full article

High-resolution air-temperature fields are essential for climate, hydrologic, and ecological applications in complex terrain, yet operational products often lack the spatial detail to resolve topographic effects. We develop an observation-driven reconstruction of daily air temperature fields for South Korea (2024) using ordinary kriging with lapse-rate correction (OKLR), integrating a dense network of over 500 stations from the Automatic Mountain Meteorology Observation System (AMOS) and the Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS). The OKLR framework systematically removes elevation-driven trends using a physically based fixed lapse rate (–6.5 °C km⁻¹), performs kriging on detrended residuals, and reapplies Digital Elevation Model (DEM)-based corrections to generate high-fidelity daily fields at a 270 m grid spacing. Unlike numerical weather prediction (NWP) models that simulate atmospheric processes, this approach reconstructs spatially continuous fields directly from dense in situ observations, ensuring empirical grounding. Extensive daily spatial cross-validation (n = 37,813) demonstrates that OKLR (MAE = 0.656 °C) significantly outperforms elevation-unadjusted ordinary kriging by ≈37% and the operational 1.5 km LDAPS product (MAE = 0.895 °C) by 27%. This performance gain is particularly pronounced in high-elevation zones (>700 m) and natural surfaces (≈73% of the study area), where topographic complexity is greatest. The final observation-constrained reconstruction attains a robust MAE of 0.462 °C with near-zero bias over 188,318 station–days. As the first nationwide daily temperature dataset for South Korea at 270 m resolution, this study provides a critical foundation for precision agriculture, ecosystem monitoring, and climate change adaptation in topographically diverse environments. Full article

The ecological benefits of urban green spaces depend on their structure and ecological service function. Evaluation systems used to monitor these characteristics show distinct regional variations. This study analyzed China’s urban green spaces, developed a quantitative ecological benefit evaluation system, and comprehensively evaluated the ecological benefits of green spaces in Xi’an city. Suitable evaluation indexes for Xi’an were selected based on field survey data with large-scale samples and high-resolution remote sensing image data. The results showed that the ecological service function of urban green spaces in Xi’an has been substantially improved by ecological planning. Therefore, it is important to evaluate this function as part of the urban planning and design process. Furthermore, increasing the 3D Green Quantity through urban forests can effectively improve the ecological service function. Full article

Determinants of consumers’ decisions in the electric vehicle market are dictated by many factors, starting from ecology to the profitability of owning an electric vehicle. Currently, the electric vehicle market in Poland grows every year. When addressing the issues related to the determinants of consumer decisions on the electric vehicle market, statistical data and an online questionnaire were used, in which 103 people, who were interested in electric vehicles, participated. The main purpose of this research was to determine what factors influence consumers’ attitude to the purchase of electric vehicles the most. The study focuses primarily on Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs), as reflected in the survey design and respondents’ interpretations of electric vehicles. The study showed that over half of the respondents are considering the purchase of an electric vehicle, and to purchase this type of car they would be more encouraged by financial support, such as subsidies from the state and tax relief, as well as free parking spaces in cities. It was also established that consumers are discouraged from buying electric vehicles by the lack of adequate infrastructure in cities needed to freely own an electric vehicle, as well as too high prices of these cars and the long time it takes to charge the battery. Full article

Accurately quantifying the ecological functions of small and micro green spaces in high density urban environments supports urban ecological planning and management. This study assessed 271 pocket parks in the main urban area of Fuzhou, China, using multi-source remote sensing data from the growing seasons of 2019 to 2024. Six indicators were derived, including NDVI, NPP, WET, NDBSI, ISI, and LST. A composite Eco-environmental Index (EEI) was constructed using the entropy weight method. We combined the coefficient of variation, Theil–Sen slope estimation, the Mann–Kendall test, and the Hurst exponent to quantify spatial heterogeneity, interannual stability, and short-term persistence. We also examined climatic associations using correlation analysis. Pocket parks consistently outperformed their surrounding 500 m buffers across all indicators, and park buffer contrasts increased for most indicators. The mean EEI significantly increased from 0.563 in 2019 to 0.650 in 2024, with a pronounced step increase around 2022. At the site level, 261 of 271 parks (96.3%) exhibited an upward trend in EEI, indicating widespread ecological improvement. Specifically, park vegetation greenness (NDVI) rose from 0.413 to 0.578, widening the gap with surrounding areas. Parks consistently maintained a lower land surface temperature (LST) than their buffers, with a cooling magnitude ranging from 3.5 °C to 4.6 °C. Precipitation was positively associated with NDVI and NPP, while LST was positively associated with air temperature and negatively associated with precipitation. These findings support the planning and adaptive management of pocket parks to strengthen urban ecological resilience. Full article

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mianning County, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture between 2023 and 2024, this paper analyzes the “xiō bū” (ꑭꁮ) ritual of the Liangshan Yi people. Framed within contemporary approaches to religious anthropology and social memory theory, the study explores how this ritual constructs Yi ecological ethics, social integration, and cultural identity through nature worship, ancestral spirit beliefs, and ritual practices. The ethnographic evidence reveals that the “xiō bū” ritual, by designating wooded mountains as sacred space and performing sacrifices to nature deities and ancestral spirits, integrates “humans—nature—ancestors” into a symbiotic system of the “community of life.” This reflects the Yi people’s relational ontology and embedded ecological knowledge. The sacrificial offerings, shared meals, and purification practices in the ritual not only reinforce reverence for nature through symbolic acts but also unify the community through Durkheimian “collective effervescence,” thereby restoring the community’s spiritual order. As a carrier of social memory, the “xiō bū” ritual, through epic chanting, symbolic performances (such as clothing, ritual implements), and bodily practices (like the ritual specialist’s movements), embeds individual memories into the collective historical narrative of the group, dynamically constructing the cultural boundaries of the “Yi” people. The ritual specialists (Bimo or Suni), as intermediaries of knowledge and power, maintain religious authority through bricolage-like symbolic reorganization and foster the creative transformation of tradition in response to the challenges of modernity. The study further reveals that while the ritual faces challenges in the contemporary context, such as secularization and population mobility, it continues to activate ethnic identity by simplifying rituals, preserving core symbols, and coupling with ecological discourses, offering a model for the modern adaptation of traditional religions. This paper argues that ritual studies should engage with contemporary theoretical approaches like the ontological turn, focus on the agency of individuals, and reflect on the insights traditional knowledge systems offer in the face of globalization and ecological crises. Full article

Rapid urbanization is fragmenting ecological spaces in megacities, threatening biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, it remains unclear whether, and under what conditions, urban ecological networks (ENs) can recover robustness once heavily disrupted. This study aims to (i) develop a dynamic assessment framework that couples network robustness and connectivity, and (ii) apply it to examine how ENs evolve under sustained urbanization and shifting policy regimes. Using multi-period data for Shenzhen, China (2000–2025), we simulate deliberate and random attacks on patches and corridors to derive data-driven thresholds that grade the importance of ecological elements, and integrate these with graph-based connectivity metrics to track changes in network structure and node centrality over time. Shenzhen’s EN exhibits a typical “fragmentation–reconfiguration–optimization” pathway, with a “rapid decline–deceleration–recovery” trajectory in robustness that closely aligns with the introduction of strict ecological control lines and subsequent restoration initiatives. The results show that targeted protection of residual core habitats, combined with strategic reconnection and infill greening in the urban interior, can reverse earlier losses in network robustness. The proposed robustness-informed framework provides operational guidance for prioritizing protection, restoration, and optimization of ecological space, and offers a transferable approach for adaptive EN planning in high-density tropical and subtropical megacities. Full article

This paper proposes a novel method, the Convergent Radiation Algorithm (CRA), aimed at multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) in circular intuitionistic fuzzy settings. The approach is aimed at reaching geometric consensus among experts, with uncertainties and hesitancies expressed via circular intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (CIFNs). First, the qualitative judgment in professionals is converted into a geometric space where experts’ assessments are represented as spatial points that reflect the differences between the opinions. All these points are gradually combined with the help of a radiation–reflection–convergence mechanism, which iteratively finds the Optimal Consensus Point (OCP) to minimize the overall weighted divergence over the evaluations. After that, a projection-based scoring method is used to locate good and bad optimal solutions, and the alternatives are ranked based on a comparison of their projection distance. It presents a numerical example with data supplied by the Hubei agro-ecological zone to demonstrate that the offered method helps to capture collective agreement and convergence behavior that is consistent, and makes the decision results readable and reliable. Full article

The purpose of this article is to introduce the concept of elliptic-valued suprametric spaces and to establish some common fixed point theorems within this newly proposed framework. The development of elliptic-valued suprametric spaces, along with the main results presented here, is illustrated through non-trivial examples. As applications, we employ our fixed point results to study the nonlinear Volterra integral equation of the second kind, demonstrating the existence and uniqueness of solutions under suitable conditions. In particular, we highlight the role of such equations in age-structured population models, where they serve as powerful tools for describing hereditary effects, density-dependent interactions, and delayed responses in population dynamics. This connection bridges the abstract theory with applied contexts in mathematical biology, ecology, and epidemiology, emphasizing the relevance of elliptic-valued suprametric structures in both theoretical analysis and real-world applications. Furthermore, we derive corresponding fixed point results in elliptic-valued suprametric spaces, complex-valued suprametric spaces, elliptic-valued metric spaces, and complex-valued metric spaces as corollaries of our main findings. Full article

Balancing protection and development is essential for mitigating anthropogenic threats and achieving sustainable development in coastal regions. However, integrated spatial planning that links marine protected areas (MPAs) with developed spaces and incorporates land–sea coordination remains insufficiently explored—despite global frameworks such as the “Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework” advocating for such integration. In this study, we used Xiamen, a typical bay city in China, as an example, assessed its habitat suitability through the MaxEnt model, and determined its key development areas through hotspot analysis, aiming to coordinate protection and development, as well as land and marine utilization in coastal areas. The results indicate the following: (1) existing protected areas require adjustments; (2) multiple development hotspots overlap, while several cold spots with limited potential for functional development were identified; (3) prioritizing MPAs in decision-making led to an approximate 42.8% increase in MPA coverage in Xiamen. Overall, this study produced a comprehensive plan that integrates both ecological and social objectives. Full article