Search Results (234)

Traditional rural settlements face challenges such as external disaster disturbances and increasing morphological vulnerability during the modernization process. Analyzing the morphological resilience of settlements and their external disturbances is crucial for enhancing the sustainable development of traditional villages. This study constructs a “cell–chain–form” framework for evaluating the morphological resilience of rural settlements, based on three biological models. It systematically analyzes the static morphological resilience performance of several typical villages in southern Shaanxi and identifies disturbance factors within the dynamic real-world context. The research methodology includes the use of GIS spatial analysis to calculate resilience indices, hierarchical analysis (AHP) for calculating disturbance indices, and GIS natural break methods for initial classification of resilience. Furthermore, structured questionnaires and SPSS27.0 statistical software were used to assess disturbance factors, followed by the proposal of classification strategies. The results show the following: (1) The construction of the “cell–chain–form” research framework from a bionic perspective provides strong explanatory power for morphological resilience assessment, validating the potential of this research paradigm; (2) Significant differences in morphological resilience were found across sample villages in terms of building layout (“cell”), road network systems (“chain”), and boundary morphology (“form”), with disturbance impacts varying by village; (3) Combining index calculations and questionnaire analysis, it was found that, overall, policy, ecological, and economic disturbance factors have a significantly greater impact than social and cultural factors, with the former serving as the main driving forces and the latter playing an auxiliary role. This study provides a new bionic perspective and theoretical support for strategies aimed at improving the morphological resilience of rural settlements, and offers new insights and methodologies for future research on sustainable rural development. Full article

In the context of China’s rural revitalization strategy, improving the livability and sustainability of traditional dwellings in border regions has become a critical priority. This study examines Chinese–Korean houses in border villages, where field investigations and quantitative analysis reveal persistent challenges: poor indoor thermal comfort and high energy consumption due to outdated building envelopes and inefficient heating systems. To address these issues, we propose an integrated retrofitting solution that combines building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) and ground-source heat pump (GSHP) technologies. Unlike previous studies focusing on isolated applications, our approach emphasizes the synergistic integration of active energy generation and high-efficiency thermal regulation, while preserving the architectural and cultural identity of traditional dwellings. Pilot results demonstrate significant improvements in PMV (Predicted Mean Vote) and economic viability, and achieve a high level of esthetic and cultural compatibility. Modular BIPV integration provides on-site renewable electricity without altering roof forms, while GSHP ensures stable, efficient heating and cooling year-round. This solution offers a replicable, regionally adaptive model for low-carbon rural housing transformation. By aligning technological innovation with cultural preservation and socioeconomic feasibility, the study contributes to a new paradigm of rural development, supporting ecological sustainability, ethnic unity, and border stability. Full article

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex and multifactorial neurodevelopmental condition whose pathogenesis remains only partially elucidated. Earlier accounts of oxidative stress in ASD often relied on the reductive paradigm of an imbalance between oxidants and antioxidants. In contrast, this narrative review, based on a systematic examination of 1102 publications indexed in scientific databases from 2002 to July 2025, reframes the discussion in terms of redox system dysfunction, a broader and more integrative construct. Here, reactive oxidant species, molecular targets, and reducing/antioxidant counterparts are considered elements of a dynamic circuitry whose maladaptation progressively undermines homeostasis. The sequence of events unfolds in three stages. The first is primary redox dysfunction, manifesting as alterations in metabolic, signaling, and defense pathways. From this disturbance, a second stage arises, marked by functional derailment of cellular compartments—from membranes and cytosol to organelles and nuclei—including mitochondrial and peroxisomal deficits. Ultimately, a third stage emerges, defined by neurodevelopmental alterations such as impaired neurotransmission, synaptic dysfunction, abnormal plasticity, morphogenetic defects, neuroinflammation, and gut–brain–microbiota disarrangements. This progression situates the redox system as a central hub at the interface between human cells and the microbiota, resonating with the ecological and evolutionary principles of the holobiont and the One Health framework. By weaving dispersed evidence into a coherent perspective, this review advances beyond previous analyses, offering a unifying paradigm that connects biochemical dysfunction to clinical heterogeneity in ASD and opens new directions for interdisciplinary research. Full article

Bioclimatic design, rooted in vernacular architecture, aims to create buildings that harmonise with their local climate and context. Over the past five decades, continuous advancements have strengthened its foundation for climate-responsive architecture. However, the development of bioinspired thinking extends new opportunities to enhance ecological sustainability and innovation in bioclimatic design. This study introduces Bioinspired Climatic Design (BCD) as an advancement of bioclimatic design, integrating ecological processes, human behaviour, and high-resolution climate data to create sustainable, climate-responsive low-carbon architecture. Focusing on residential buildings in hot–humid climates, it categorises BCD strategies into primary and modifying adaptive approaches, examined through four case studies using observation and spatial analysis. Findings emphasise the importance of aligning design with climate, ecology, and occupant behaviour to achieve low-carbon, resilient architecture, especially in challenging conditions. The research calls for a paradigm shift from conventional climate-responsive design towards a holistic, ecologically integrated framework for future-oriented built environments. Full article

Forests are critical ecosystems that play a fundamental role in supporting biodiversity and maintaining climate stability. However, forest monitoring and exploration present huge challenges due to the vast scale and complex terrain. This paper proposes a novel bionic robot, PteroBot, designed to support a new paradigm for forest exploration inspired by the locomotion of Pteromyini. PteroBot is capable of regulating its gliding posture via a flexible membrane, enabling low-energy and low-disturbance mobility within forest environments. An adaptive gliding control system tailored to the robot’s structure is developed and its effectiveness is validated through aerodynamic analysis, simulation, and experimental testing. Results show that under a cascaded closed-loop attitude controller, PteroBot achieves an average glide ratio of 2.02 and demonstrates controllable turning via attitude modulation. Additionally, comparative tests with UAVs demonstrate that PteroBot offers significant advantages in energy efficiency and acoustic disturbance. Experimental outcomes confirm that PteroBot offers a biologically inspired and ecologically compatible solution for forest exploration, with strong potential in applications such as environmental monitoring, habitat assessment, and covert reconnaissance. Full article

The Niokolo-Koba National Park (NKNP) was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1981 for its exceptional biodiversity and unique ecosystem. However, due to poaching, livestock grazing, and dam construction projects in the Sambangalou area, the site was added to the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2007. Through regional and international cooperation, enhanced monitoring, and community engagement in conservation efforts, the site was removed from the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2024. As a typical case of the entire process from inscription on to removal from the World Heritage List in Danger, the NKNP’s threats and successful removal experience profoundly reveal complex internal and external challenges and governance needs in heritage conservation. Its successful experience can provide valuable lessons for World Heritage sites around the world facing similar threats. As part of our qualitative research, we reviewed the literature from UNESCO and IUCN, which annually assessed the state of conservation of the NKNP between 2007 and 2024. In 2024, a field mission assessed on-site conservation progress and discussed challenges and responses to the NKNP management with 30 stakeholders. Our results highlight the lengthy and potentially costly process of removal, such as Senegal’s EUR 4.57 million Emergency Plan, the threats to the park’s integrity by the State itself, and the value placed on World Heritage status, further emphasizing the need for long-term investment from both the national government and international partners. Therefore, ensuring returns on such investment, whether through increased ecotourism, international recognition, or strengthened ecosystem services, is essential for sustainable conservation financing. The case of the NKNP also illustrates the positive impact of improved national governance and partnerships involving international and local NGOs, as well as the private sector, on conservation efforts. It also highlights the importance of a new collaborative governance paradigm for heritage sites facing severe human interference (poaching, illegal development) and governance challenges, particularly in ecologically fragile or socio-economically pressured regions, by strengthening national responsibility, leveraging international mechanisms, and activating local participation. Full article

Academic researchers in technical and policy fields tend to pay little attention to the metaphysical and ontological ‘priors’ that nevertheless structure and determine scientific strategies and results. Green political agendas rooted in ecological modernization (EM) are distinguished from antecedent visions predicated on biophysical limits. Net zero is shown to be rooted in a project of global EM. Ecomodernism is analyzed in relation to its principal actors, geopolitical context and underlying metaphysics and anthropology. It is driven by non-negotiable societal priorities (‘ends’), which themselves derive from a particular set of technical ‘means’. The top-down version of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4.0) and new paradigm of global net zero constitute an integrated agenda of eco-modernism. Global net zero cannot hope to achieve its own metabolic goals in respect of either energy flows or the circular economy. A competing, bottom-up and distributed model of the IR4.0 could potentially achieve these targets without falling prey to the Jevons paradox. This potential turns on the greater capacity of low-overhead, prosumer models to nurture less materialist cultural priorities that are more communitarian and family-oriented. A smart energy system that emerges in the context of distributed, domestic and informal production is much more likely to mirror the complex, infinitely gradated and granular pattern of oscillating energy transfers that are characteristic of biological systems. From an ecological economic perspective, such a bottom-up approach to the IR4.0 is much more likely to see the orders of magnitude reduction in the unit energetic cost of social complexity envisaged, in principle, by net zero. Through this comprehensive review of the metaphysical and ontological priors of mainstream IR4.0, researchers in the linked fields of energy and circular economy are presented with a wider range of potential options less constrained by preconceived assumptions about the ‘ends’ of societal development and progress. Full article

Background: Urban loneliness is rising worldwide and is a recognised public-health threat. Nature-Based Social Prescriptions (NBSPs), guided group activities in natural settings, are being piloted in six cities through the EU project RECETAS. However, in new contexts such as Marseille, its implementation is constrained by professionals’ limited knowledge of the concept. Objectives: (i) Exploring how professionals in Marseille (France) conceptualise NBSPs; (ii) Identifying perceived facilitators and barriers to implementing NBSPs among residents facing social isolation and loneliness. Methods: Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with health, social-care, and urban–environment professionals selected via network mapping and snowball sampling. Verbatim transcripts underwent inductive thematic analysis informed by Social Representation Theory, with double coding to enhance reliability. Results: Five analytic themes emerged: (1) a holistic health paradigm linking nature, community, and well-being; (2) stark ecological inequities with limited green-space access in deprived districts; (3) work challenges due to the urgent needs of individuals facing significant socio-economic challenges in demanding contexts; (4) a key tension between a perceived top-down process and a preference for participatory approaches; (5) drivers and obstacles: strong professional endorsement of NBSPs meets significant systemic and institutional constraints. Conclusions: Professionals endorse NBSPs as a promising approach against loneliness, provided programmes tackle structural inequities and adopt participatory governance. Results inform the Marseille RECETAS pilot and contribute to global discussions on environmentally anchored health promotion. Full article

Major human impacts on New Zealand’s ecology began about 800 years ago with immigration firstly from Polynesia, then Europe starting a few centuries later. The humans cleared habitat, hunted species to extinction, and introduced biota, including plants, birds, fish, invertebrates, and mammals. Over the last 70 years, government-funded campaigns have been waged against some of the introduced mammals that became considered harmful to native biota. These campaigns spread poisonous food baits from aircraft to kill and suppress target animals (mainly brushtail possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) and rats (Rattus spp.)) over large areas. Increased intensity, frequency, and scale of poisoning are being trialled under a new conservation strategy (Predator Free 2050) to eradicate several mammalian species. The present study investigates the opportunity for a paradigm shift in conservation, emphasizing the rationales for transitioning from spreading of pesticides to a more targeted approach. NZ’s poison- and predator-focused ecological management has been criticized internationally as cruel and unnecessary, while independent NZ ecologists have called for, and outlined, a new system of conservation management based on ecological knowledge, which embraces all threats to native biota. A central tenet of proposed new methods is the engagement of all relevant stakeholders. Efficient management tools include remote monitoring, and smart, self-resetting kill traps for targeted small mammal control. Ecology-driven, commercially sound, targeted, monitored, relatively humane management can be implemented to protect the remnants of NZ’s natural heritage. Full article

With the increasing attention to China’s ecological environment protection and the prominence of lake water environment problems, the impact of soil erosion on lake ecosystems has become an important research topic for regional sustainable development. Based on the CiteSpace bibliometric method, this study systematically analyzed 225 research articles on the impact of soil erosion on the water environment of lakes in China in the core collection of Web of Science from 1998 to 2025, aiming to reveal the research hotspots, evolution trends and regional differences in this field. The results show that China occupies a dominant position in this field (209 papers), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences is the core research institution (93 papers). The research hotspots show obvious policy-driven characteristics, which are divided into slow start periods (1998–2007), accelerated growth periods (2008–2015), explosive growth periods (2016–2020) and stable development periods (2021–2025). A keyword cluster analysis identified nine main research directions, including sedimentation effect (#0 cluster), soil loss (#2 cluster) and nitrogen and phosphorus migration (#11 cluster) in the Three Gorges Reservoir area. The study found that the synergistic effects of climate change and human activities (such as land use change) are becoming a new research paradigm, and the Yangtze River Basin, the Loess Plateau and the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau constitute the three core research areas (accounting for 72.3% of the total literature). Future research should focus on a multi-scale coupling mechanism, a climate resilience assessment and an ecological engineering effectiveness verification to support the precise implementation of lake protection policies in China. This study provides a scientific basis for the comprehensive management of the soil erosion–lake water environment system, and also contributes a Chinese perspective to the sustainable development goals (SDG6 and SDG15) of similar regions in the world. Full article

This paper introduces and defines ‘Living Cultural Infrastructure’ as dynamic social-ecological systems where plant heritage and community knowledge are co-produced to reclaim degraded urban landscapes. Addressing the dual challenges of ecological degradation and cultural erosion, we demonstrate this concept through a case study on the Maekha Canal in Chiang Mai, Thailand, employing Participatory Landscape Architecture integrated with urban ethnobotany. Through co-design workshops, biocultural spatial analysis, and ethnobotanical surveys involving 20 key community members, the project engaged residents to reclaim the canal as a functional biocultural corridor. The research documented 149 culturally significant plant species and resulted in a co-created trail system that embodies the principles of a living infrastructure, fostering intergenerational knowledge exchange and strengthening community stewardship. This study demonstrates how a participatory, ethnobotany-informed process can regenerate degraded urban waterways into Living Cultural Infrastructure. The research advances a new paradigm for landscape architecture by providing replicable governance and design tools. Full article

Against the backdrop of ongoing degradation of ecosystem services and the increasing demand for sustainable development, the scientific delineation of ecological management zones has become a critical means by which to balance human wellbeing and ecological conservation. This study takes Jiangxi Province as the research area and selects four typical ecosystem services—food production, water supply, carbon storage, and soil retention—to systematically evaluate their supply–demand relationships from both static and dynamic dimensions. By introducing the entropy weight method to construct a comprehensive supply–demand index and integrating a coupling coordination degree model with a four-quadrant dynamic evolution model, this paper proposes a coupled “static–dynamic” analytical framework. The findings reveal significant spatial heterogeneity in various ecosystem services; high-supply areas are concentrated in the southern and peripheral mountainous regions while demand is closely linked to population distribution, exhibiting a pattern of high demand in the central areas and high supply in the peripheral areas. Our supply–demand matching analysis uncovers a distinct gradient distribution characterized by core imbalance and peripheral coordination, with prominent supply–demand conflicts in urban expansion areas and enhanced coordination in peripheral ecological barrier zones. Based on these insights, we divide Jiangxi Province into five types of ecological management zones: Degraded Restoration, Conflict Mitigation, Coordination Enhancement, Potential Development, and Maintenance Conservation, with tailored management strategies proposed for each zone type. As a result, this study not only provides scientific support for regional ecological spatial optimization but also offers a new methodological paradigm for ecosystem services management. Full article

Natural resource assets inherently integrate tripartite synthesis of legal, economic, and ecological attributes. They serve dual critical functions as foundational elements supporting the evolution of new-quality productive forces and pivotal mechanisms safeguarding ecosystemic integrity. It has become a global consensus and direction of action to advance comprehensive supervision of natural resource assets and practice the concept of “Community of Life for Human and Nature”. Under the background of the super-ministry system restructuring in China, comprehensive supervision of natural resource assets remains challenged by system fragmentation in supervision objectives and multifaceted interest conflicts among stakeholders. In light of this, this research focuses on the theoretical justification and system optimization of the comprehensive supervision of natural resource assets in China. Using comparative analysis and normative analysis methods, we validate the system’s function on the comprehensive supervision of natural resource assets, summarize foreign experiences, and ultimately aim to explore the optimization pathway of the legal system for the comprehensive supervision of natural resource assets. The results show the following: (1) The choice of the legal system for the comprehensive supervision of natural resource assets emerges as the functional product aligning societal objectives, the rational paradigm for achieving efficient resource allocation, and the adaptive response to the external effects of common property. (2) The system supply of comprehensive supervision of natural resource assets in foreign countries is characterized by normative convergence in conceptual elements and typological categorization in objectives and objects. Therefore, this research recommends that, in order to optimize the system of the comprehensive supervision of natural resource assets in China, (1) in terms of protection of source, natural resource assets should be categorized, with operational natural resource assets focusing on management and public welfare natural resource assets focusing on conservation. (2) In terms of valuation, the economic valuation of natural resource assets should be integrated with ecosystem service assessments to enhance fair market equity. (3) In terms of method, the big data center should be established to enable the synergistic integration of technological innovation and system reforms. (4) In terms of subject, requiring the participation of various government departments, non-governmental organizations, the general public, and other parties could realize the connection of different legal bases for the comprehensive supervision of natural resource assets and the balance of multiple rights and interests, which should help to achieve balanced resource efficiency and biodiversity conservation and safeguard national ecological security. Full article

This review systematically summarizes recent advances in ultrasound–chemical catalytic synergistic technology for controlling harmful algae blooms, focusing on the multi-mechanism cooperation of catalysts, oxidants, and nanomaterials within sonocavitation systems. The technology enhances coupling efficiency between cavitation effects and radical oxidation while leveraging interfacial regulation capabilities of catalysts (e.g., charge adsorption, carrier migration) to selectively disrupt algae cell structures and efficiently degrade extracellular organic matter. Three key innovations are highlighted: (1) development of a multi-mechanism synergistic system that overcomes traditional technical limitations through moderate pre-oxidation strategies for precise algae control; (2) first systematic elucidation of the bridging role of sonoporation in ultrasound–chemical synergy; (3) decipherment of interface-targeted regulation mechanisms that enhance oxidation efficiency. Collectively, these advances establish an engineerable new paradigm characterized by high efficiency, operational stability, and minimized ecological risks. Full article

Achieving a win-win situation for both economy and ecology is crucial for promoting sustainable social development and shaping new advantages in high-quality developments. This article constructs an ecological economic resilience (EER) analysis framework by integrating both ecological and economic dimensions from a resilience perspective. Based on panel data from 290 cities in China, it explores the dynamic evolution characteristics, regional differences, and convergence trends of EER. The findings indicate that the EER has weakened nationwide and in the four major economic regions, overall tending towards stability. Significant disparities exist in EER, particularly pronounced in the northeast. There is $\sigma$ convergence in the nation as well as in the northeast and east regions. Additionally, both absolute and conditional $\beta$ convergence is evident nationwide and in all regions, with conditional convergence occurring at a faster pace. The research findings in this paper provide solid theoretical support for promoting regional coordinated development and constructing a new development paradigm. Full article