Search Results (60)

Sustainable rice production requires management strategies that reduce drainage-related nitrogen export while maintaining grain yield under increasingly constrained water and labor conditions. This study evaluated a controlled-irrigation-based integrated management regime in direct-seeded and mechanically transplanted rice under production-field conditions in the lower Yangtze River region, China. The optimized regime combined threshold-based controlled irrigation, functional basal fertilizer, and key-stage foliar regulation, whereas the traditional treatments followed local conventional flooding and fertilization practices. Drainage-related total nitrogen (TN) export was mainly associated with rainfall or irrigation-overflow events after fertilization. Compared with the corresponding traditional treatments, optimized management reduced irrigation input by 28.5% and 26.4%, cumulative drainage volume by 54.8% and 46.5%, and monitored-event TN export load by 63.6% and 60.0% in mechanically transplanted and direct-seeded rice, respectively. Grain yields reached 10,088 and 9870 kg ha⁻¹ in Opt-MT and Opt-DS, increasing by 6.5% and 7.2%, respectively. The optimized treatments also reduced chalky grain rate and chalkiness degree, although head rice rate did not improve synchronously. These findings provide field-based evidence that integrated management may help coordinate monitored drainage-related nitrogen-export mitigation, water-saving irrigation, and yield maintenance under similar production-field conditions. Full article

Abiotic stresses, including drought, salinity, alkalinity, temperature extremes, flooding, heavy metals, and emerging pollutants, challenge plant growth and productivity by disturbing water relations, ion balance, redox homeostasis, membrane stability, energy metabolism, and developmental progression. Although substantial progress has been made in the identification of stress-responsive hormones, second messengers, kinases, transcription factors, transporters, and metabolic regulators, plant stress adaptation cannot be fully explained by linear signaling cascades or single tolerance genes. A major unresolved question is how early molecular events are reorganized into coordinated physiological and developmental outputs that support survival, recovery, and productivity. In this review, we propose an intermolecular interaction-driven adaptive remodeling framework for plant abiotic stress responses. This framework emphasizes that stress tolerance emerges from dynamic changes in receptor–ligand recognition, protein–protein interactions, calcium decoding, redox-sensitive modification, phosphorylation networks, transcriptional regulation, chromatin-associated control, and metabolite-mediated feedback. We further emphasize ROS as integrative redox switches that connect stress sensing, defense activation, senescence-related transitions, and recovery, and chromatin-associated mechanisms as regulators that may stabilize primed or memory-like adaptive states. We discuss how these interaction networks converge on core signaling hubs, including abscisic acid, reactive oxygen species, Ca²⁺, and kinase/phosphatase systems, and how they remodel stomatal behavior, root architecture, ion and pH homeostasis, redox buffering, metabolism, development, and reproductive resilience. We further highlight how natural variation, multi-omics, genome editing, high-throughput phenotyping, and field validation can translate interaction-centered stress biology into crop resilience. This perspective provides a conceptual bridge between molecular stress perception, network behavior, physiological adaptation, and climate-resilient agriculture. Full article

Traditional reservoir flood control operations in China have long relied on a fixed flood-limited water level (FLWL), which frequently results in the underutilization of water resources during flood seasons. Dynamic FLWL regulation and joint reservoir operation have emerged as core strategies to optimize floodwater resource utilization while ensuring flood control safety. However, these approaches typically treat the flood control storage capacity of individual reservoirs as fixed constraints, failing to consider the potential for reallocating this capacity within a cascade reservoir system. This study explores the concept of “equivalent utilization of flood control storage capacity” among cascade reservoirs. Focusing on the four major reservoirs (Wudongde, Baihetan, Xiluodu, and Xiangjiaba) in the lower reaches of the Jinsha River, a methodology for analyzing the equivalent index of their flood control storage capacity is established. The core of this methodology involves a two-round scheduling simulation under various design flood scenarios. The first round of simulation adheres to standard operating rules, while the second round allows upstream reservoirs to retain additional flood volume—with downstream reservoirs correspondingly reducing their outflow—on the premise that downstream safety targets are satisfied. The equivalent index is defined as the ratio of the reduced storage capacity utilized downstream to the additional storage capacity utilized upstream. Nine design flood scenarios (covering three typical years with 1%, 2%, and 5% exceedance probabilities) for flood control in the Sichuan–Chongqing reach were analyzed, with the tightly coupled Wudongde–Baihetan and Xiluodu–Xiangjiaba reservoir pairs treated as two integrated units. The results indicate that the equivalent indices between these two reservoir groups range from 0.96 to 0.999, demonstrating near-perfect functional interchangeability of their flood control storage capacities for the specified research objective. For practical engineering application, a value of 0.96 is recommended as the lower-bound equivalent index. This study provides a methodological framework and specific index to support the dynamic, coordinated, and more efficient utilization of flood control storage capacity in large-scale cascade reservoir systems. Full article

Ensuring resilient controllability and observability in SCADA-based smart grids under coordinated cyberattacks remains a critical and unresolved challenge in modern cyber-physical power systems. This paper investigates the impact of coordinated cyberattacks on the stability and monitoring capabilities of SCADA-based smart-grid systems within a controlled cyber-physical environment. An active cyber-physical testbed representing a multi-bus power system was created to analyze how attacks targeting communication channels affect controllability and observability. Several attack scenarios were implemented, including remote access attacks via Secure Shell (SSH), Modbus/TCP flooding, and ICMP-based attacks, to monitor their impact on control actions, communication reliability, and system responsiveness. To address these vulnerabilities, a SCADA-based cybersecurity monitoring system was implemented within the controlled testbed environment. The system analyzes SCADA operational logs from smart grid devices while packet-level network traffic is captured and examined using monitoring tools such as Wireshark. A central monitoring layer coordinates system-wide attack detection and response. System resilience was evaluated using controllability and observability matrix rank analysis, together with dynamic stability metrics during attack conditions. Experimental and simulation results show that coordinated cyberattacks significantly degrade system performance, with the average delay rising from 12 ms to 210 ms, the packet loss rate increasing to 15.5%, and the command execution error rate reaching 40%. Furthermore, the ranks of the controllability and observability matrices dropped from 4 to 2, indicating a critical partial loss of the system’s control and monitoring capabilities. In this work, the federated-learning-based component is explored as a distributed, privacy-preserving cybersecurity monitoring framework for anomaly detection and observability enhancement using SCADA-derived datasets, rather than as a fully integrated real-time SCADA operational control mechanism. At the same time, the attack’s impact on electrical properties remained limited to less than 2%. Full article

Flood control safety (FCS) is fundamental to sustainable development in river basins facing rapid urbanization and ecological stress. Taking the Haihe River Basin in China as a case study, this paper evaluates the temporal evolution of the three-subsystem development of social, ecological, and flood control safety from 2008 to 2022, and assesses the coupling coordination degree (CCD) of the social–ecological system (SES). The dynamic relationship between FCS and SES coordination is further examined using a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model, while grey relational analysis with bootstrap resampling is employed to assess the associations between specific FCS indicators and SES coordination. The results show that all three subsystems improved over the study period, and the basin’s CCD increased from severe imbalance to a more coordinated stage. However, FCS remained the relatively weak subsystem, and its constraining role became more evident under the basin-area-weighted assessment. The overall temporal pattern is broadly consistent across different weighting schemes, although the absolute coordination levels vary. The PVAR results indicate that changes in FCS predict subsequent changes in SES coordination, whereas the reverse relationship is not statistically supported. Grey relational analysis further suggests that several FCS indicators, including levee length, reservoir capacity, and soil and water conservation measures, are similarly strongly associated with SES coordination. These findings suggest that improvements in observed coordination do not necessarily indicate that basin resilience has been fully established. Integrating flood control safety into SES assessment can provide a more policy-relevant basis for flood risk governance in highly urbanized and water-stressed basins. Full article

A large number of reservoirs (or hydropower plants) have been constructed for flood control and energy production in the past several decades in the Yangtze River basin in China. The conventional scheduling rule curves (Scheme A) were designed in the reservoir construction period and did not consider river flow alternation, which needs to be modified to increase comprehensive benefits in the reservoir operation period. In this study, six large-scale cascade reservoirs or mega hydropower systems constructed and operated by the China Yangtze Three Gorges Corporation were selected for this case study. The current joint scheduling plans of cascade reservoirs (Scheme B) were introduced, and a joint scheduling and multi-objective coordinating operation model (Scheme C) was proposed for this mega hydropower system. The Gaussian radial basis functions (GRBFs) were used to fit operation policies of each reservoir, and the Borg multi-objective evolutionary algorithm was selected to optimize three-objective functions for Scheme C. The observed daily flow data series at main hydrometric stations from 2003 to 2025 were used to simulate and compare different operation scheduling schemes. The results show that the performance of joint scheduling of cascade reservoirs (both Schemes B and C) is much better than the single-reservoir scheduling (Schemes A) with overall benefit; Scheme C-best achieves a comprehensive target of decreasing average annual spillway wastewater by 12.82 billion m³ (or a decrease of 28.5%), increasing average annual power generation by 31.02 billion kWh (or an increase of 10.7%), and improving average annual impoundment efficiency rate by 5.0%. The GRBFs can fit reservoir operation policies well, while the Borg multi-objective evolutionary algorithm can quickly converge with high-precision non-dominated solution sets. The proposed joint scheduling and multi-objective coordinating operation model will provide a scientific basis for achieving maximum benefits in flood protection and hydropower generation for the mega hydropower system. Full article

To address the issue that substations are prone to failures during flood disasters, which further cause large-scale and prolonged power outages, a coordinated optimal allocation strategy of flood control resources is proposed to enhance power grid resilience. Firstly, the failure and network features for substations are constructed considering the uncertainty of flood depth. Subsequently, a representative set of failure scenarios for transmission and distribution (T&D) substations is generated based on feature selection. Secondly, accounting for the coupling relationship between the availability status of T&D substations and the operation strategies of active distribution networks, a transmission-distribution coordinated stochastic optimization model is established to optimize the allocation of flood control resources. The objective is to minimize the system’s expected comprehensive costs incurred by substation structural damage and load shedding constrained by the pre-disaster substation protection constraints and the operation constraints in T&D networks during flood disasters. Finally, numerical case studies based on the improved T24D40 system are conducted. The results demonstrate that the feature-selection-based scenario generation method enables the critical substations with high failure rates and network importance to gain higher protection priority. More importantly, compared with separate decision-making and with limited coordinated decision-making for T&D substation protection schemes, the proposed model, which could effectively maximize the utilization efficiency of flood control resources, reduces the system’s expected comprehensive costs by 32.1% and 8.9%, respectively. Full article

The Beijiang River Basin is an important ecological security protection area and water source supply area in Guangdong Province. This study assesses the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of watershed water quality based on on-site monitoring data and multivariate statistical analysis. The results indicate that PO₄³⁻P concentrations peak during the flood season, whereas pH, NO₃⁻-N, and total nitrogen (TN) reach their highest levels during the autumn normal-flow period. Spatially, water quality follows a gradient of upstream > downstream > midstream, with the midstream region identified as the primary zone of water quality degradation. Future non-point source (NPS) pollution characteristics in the Beijiang River Basin are influenced by land use/cover change (LUCC) and climate change, showing significant variation across Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios. Under SSP126, precipitation increases at the slowest rate, with a peak annual value of 1599.77 mm during 2031–2040 and an average basin temperature of 19.61 °C. In contrast, SSP245 exhibits a marked increase in precipitation, reaching 1802.92 mm by 2061–2070. Under SSP585, annual precipitation rises to 2200.04 mm, with temperatures approximately 0.5 °C higher than those under SSP126. Simulations based on the improved ESP-PLUS model indicate that, under the natural development scenario (NDS), expansion of construction land increases urban runoff pollution by 32.97%. Under the economic development scenario (EDS), 1023 km² of ecological land is lost, significantly weakening pollution interception capacity, while construction land increases by 26.01%. In contrast, the coordinated development scenario (CDS) reduces ecological land loss by more than 60% compared to EDS through balanced development and conservation, thereby maintaining the basin’s pollutant purification function. Overall, future nitrogen and phosphorus loads in the watershed are projected to first decrease and then increase. Accordingly, differentiated management strategies are recommended, emphasizing the coordinated development of economic growth and ecological protection, and providing a scientific basis for controlling NPS pollution under changing climatic conditions. Full article

During the rainy season, open-channel irrigation systems (OCISs) in the hilly regions of southern China simultaneously undertake flood discharge and storage tasks, which are critical for flood mitigation, rainwater resource utilization, and long-term water security in climate-vulnerable monsoon regions. However, existing methods typically adopt a decoupled framework that separates optimization calculations from rule corrections, often leading to repeated “optimize–correct–reoptimize” iterations and struggling to coordinate the coupling between channel water level evolution and gate operation rules, resulting in frequent gate movements, intensified water level fluctuations, and elevated operational risks. To address these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid model predictive control method (HyMPC) for flood regulation in irrigation canal systems. The method jointly optimizes discrete gate opening and closing states with continuous water level dynamics within a receding prediction horizon. It employs discrete variables to represent gate states and water level zoning, continuous variables to describe channel water level processes, and an integrator-delay model to establish bidirectional coupling between them, enabling coordinated gate group control under combined flood discharge and storage conditions. Taking the flood event from 17 to 20 July 2020, in the Shi River Irrigation District, Anhui Province, China, as a case study, the proposed method was validated through comparative experiments. Results show that, compared with conventional MPC-based canal control models, the method improves gate regulation smoothness (13.33% reduction in the dimensionless integrated absolute flow change), water level stability (26.08% reduction in the high-frequency component of water level fluctuations), and rainwater resource utilization efficiency (6.98% improvement). Scenario analysis further demonstrates that the method can effectively enhance regulation stability and rainwater resource utilization while ensuring flood safety, providing a robust technical pathway and quantifiable tool for adaptive, integrated flood–drought management in irrigation canal systems. Full article

Effective command-and-control (C2) decision-making during emergency response relies on timely access to spatially accurate information. It also requires a clear understanding of evolving incident conditions. Traditional fire-service training methods provide limited opportunities to rehearse complex, high-risk, and large-scale incidents under realistic yet safe conditions. This exploratory pilot study presents the design and experimental evaluation of an integrated training environment that combines geographic information system (GIS) data, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery, and immersive virtual reality (VR) simulations to support C2 training for fire-service incident commanders. The system was assessed through scenario-based exercises involving 23 active incident commanders across three representative emergency scenarios: wildland fire, hazardous materials transport accident, and flood response. The training scenarios were based on real geographic areas in central Slovakia, using authentic terrain, land-cover, infrastructure, and hydrological GIS layers to ensure spatial realism of the simulated emergency environments. Pre-training and post-training questionnaires were used to evaluate perceived training realism, preparedness for command tasks, decision-making confidence, and the perceived usefulness of digital spatial information tools. Results indicate a substantial post-training increase in perceived realism and preparedness, with strong positive correlation between these variables (Spearman ρ = 0.71, p < 0.001). Participants reported improved confidence in assessing incident conditions, prioritizing operational tasks, and allocating resources under dynamically evolving scenarios. The study evaluates perceived spatial situational understanding derived from multi-source spatial information integration rather than directly measured situational awareness using standardized psychometric instruments. UAV imagery was found to be particularly valuable for rapid incident size-up, while GIS layers primarily supported spatial planning, hazard delineation, and resource coordination; VR served as a unifying platform for fusing these information sources into a coherent operational picture. Scenario-specific differences in tool usefulness were observed, reflecting the spatial and risk characteristics of each incident type. Overall, the findings indicate that integrated GIS–UAV–VR environments provide a realistic and scalable complement to traditional fire-service command training, enhancing spatially supported decision-making and preparedness for complex emergency response. Given the single-group pretest–posttest design, limited sample size, absence of a control group, and reliance on perceived evaluation measures, the results should be interpreted as indicative rather than as generalizable evidence of training effectiveness. Full article

Rising global temperatures lead to a continuous increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, posing serious threats to terrestrial homeotherms. However, adaptive changes in respiratory metabolism and molecular mechanisms in lung tissues of small mammals under extreme water shortage conditions remain unclear. This study hypothesized that small desert mammals can adapt to extreme water shortage environments by regulating the plasticity of lung tissue gene expression and respiratory metabolism. Using 29 wild-caught Siberian jerboas (Orientallactaga sibirica) as subjects, we implemented a 12-day complete water deprivation protocol to simulate extreme aridity. Body weight, food intake, and daily energy expenditure (DEE) were monitored throughout the experiment. Whole-transcriptome sequencing of lung tissues was performed to profile mRNA, circRNA, and miRNA expression, with competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network analysis to explore molecular mechanisms underlying lung adaptation to water deprivation. Over the 12-day water deprivation (WS) period, Orientallactaga sibirica (O. sibirica) exhibited a 30.3% reduction in body mass and a 68.1% decrease in food intake relative to the baseline level. DEE during the peak activity period at the end of the experiment was 12.6% lower in the WS group compared to the control group. In lung tissue, structural integrity-related genes (Mybl2, Ccnb1) were downregulated. A key finding was that circ_0015576 exhibits a significant positive correlation with the potassium channel gene Kcnk15 and a robust negative correlation with miR-503-5p—suggesting that circ_0015576 functions as a competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) to sequester miR-503-5p and thereby derepress Kcnk15 expression. Core regulatory genes (ApoA4, Dusp15 etc.) were also coordinately downregulated. Collectively, these results indicate that O. sibirica reduces overall energy expenditure, which may be associated with lung gene expression plasticity, such as those related with lung cell proliferation, pulmonary function, and gas exchange efficiency. This metabolic downregulation facilitates energy conservation under severe water scarcity. Full article

Complex water networks face prominent contradictions among flood control, water supply, and ecological protection, and traditional scheduling models struggle to address multi-dimensional water security challenges. To solve this problem, this study proposes a multi-objective coordinated water resources scheduling model for complex water networks, taking the Taihu Lake Basin as a typical case. First, a multi-objective optimization indicator system covering flood control, water supply, and aquatic ecological environment was constructed, including 12 key indicators such as drainage efficiency of key outflow hubs and water supply guarantee rate. Second, a dynamic variable weighting strategy was adopted to convert the multi-objective optimization problem into a single-objective one by adjusting indicator weights according to different scheduling periods. Finally, a combined solving mode integrating a basin water quantity-quality model and a joint scheduling decision model was established, optimized using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Under the 1991-Type 100-Year Return Period Rainfall scenario, three scheduling schemes were designed: a basic scheduling scheme and two enhanced discharge schemes modified by lowering the drainage threshold of the Xinmeng River Project. Simulation and decision results show that the enhanced discharge scheme with the lowest drainage threshold achieves the optimal performance with an objective function value of 98.8. Compared with the basic scheme, it extends the flood season drainage days of the Jiepai Hub from 32 to 43 days, increases the average flood season discharge of the Xinmeng River to the Yangtze River by 9.5%, and reduces the maximum water levels of Wangmuguan, Fangqian, Jintan, and Changzhou (III) stations by 5 cm, 5 cm, 4 cm, and 4 cm, respectively. This model effectively overcomes technical bottlenecks such as conflicting multi-objectives and complex water system structures, providing theoretical and technical support for multi-objective coordinated scheduling of water resources in complex water networks. Full article

Globally, intensive groundwater extraction has led to widespread land subsidence, posing severe threats to urban infrastructure, structural safety, and flood control capacity, and resulting in substantial economic losses and ecological degradation. Based on dynamic monitoring data and a poroelastic fluid–solid coupling model developed using COMSOL Multiphysics 6.2, this study systematically investigates the characteristics and evolution of land subsidence in Decheng District before and after the implementation of a groundwater extraction ban. Furthermore, recommendations and strategies for the sustainable management of regional groundwater resources are proposed. The results indicate that after the ban was enforced in 2020, the extraction volumes of deep and shallow groundwater in Decheng District decreased from 830,000 m³/a and 33,070,000 m³/a to 178,000 m³/a and 20,775,000 m³/a, respectively. The ban significantly influenced groundwater levels, with the recovery rate of deep groundwater increasing markedly from approximately 0.5 m/a before the ban to about 5 m/a afterward. Groundwater levels directly govern the rate of land subsidence; their decline increases the effective stress within the strata, leading to aquifer compaction and subsequent subsidence. Following the ban, the subsidence rate in Decheng District decreased significantly, with the annual subsidence volume reduced by more than 80% compared to the pre-ban period. Predictive analysis using the fluid–solid coupling model reveals that extraction from deep confined aquifers is the main driver of regional subsidence, with a time lag of approximately five years between groundwater level changes and subsidence response. After the implementation of the extraction ban, the subsidence rate slowed considerably. Over the long term, the subsiding strata tend to stabilize, although most of the subsidence that has already occurred is irreversible, making it difficult for the strata to return to their original state. In summary, the groundwater extraction ban has effectively facilitated groundwater recovery and mitigated land subsidence in Decheng District, though the response exhibits both temporal lag and spatial variability. Future work should focus on establishing an integrated monitoring and regulation system for land subsidence and groundwater dynamics to ensure the coordinated security of both water resources and the geological environment. These findings provide a scientific basis for informing land subsidence prevention and guiding the rational exploitation of groundwater resources in Decheng District. Full article

Arundo donax L. (common reed), a highly invasive species in Mediterranean wetlands such as the Albufera Natural Park, poses significant ecological and management challenges. Using Landsat-5 and Sentinel-2 NDVI data, this study quantified changes in its coverage between 1996 and 2024. The results reveal a significant expansion, showing a decreasing trend (91.4 ha in 1996 to 62.5 ha in 2011; −31.6%) followed by a clear rebound (83.5 ha in 2024; +33.6%), especially in the southern shrublands of the lagoon. A Mann–Kendall analysis confirmed a significant decreasing trend during 1996–2011 and an increasing trend during 2011–2024 (p < 0.05). The results indicate that previous control efforts reduced A. donax cover but that the species has recolonised after 2011, likely due to discontinuous management. These dynamics emphasise that long-term monitoring is required. Management strategies must focus on targeting the rhizome and implementing long-term monitoring programmes spanning three to five years. The utilisation of remote sensing methodologies proved effective in the monitoring of coverage, thereby facilitating the development of remediation strategies. It is imperative that actions accord primacy to critical areas such as the south and canals, complemented by native restoration and enhanced inter-administrative coordination, with the communication of benefits such as flood risk reduction. A balanced approach is required that considers ecological objectives, risks, and socio-political aspects. Full article

The rise of English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education presents challenges for supporting language development alongside disciplinary learning, as it is typically delivered by content specialists with limited time and little or no background in language pedagogy. Against this backdrop, this study examines the effectiveness of computer-assisted content-based structured input (CBSI), compared to input flood (IF) and unmodified disciplinary input (Control), in enhancing students’ acquisition of English verb patterns in an EMI university course in Poland. All participants received the same asynchronous, computer-assisted disciplinary instruction, aligned with the course syllabus. The groups differed only in the type of input enhancement, which was developed by a language specialist in coordination with the course instructor. A split-block design was used to measure learning gains through a pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test. Students in the CBSI group showed significantly greater and more sustained improvement than those in the IF and Control groups. These findings support CBSI as an effective and pedagogically feasible way to promote language development in EMI, integrating linguistic and disciplinary concerns while respecting the roles and integrity of both domains. Full article