The Chinese yew (Taxus wallichiana), which is widely distributed in the Himalayas and in southern China, is now on the edge of extinction. In order to understand the evolutionary processes that control the current diversity within this species at the genetic and ecological levels, its genetic patterns and range dynamics must first be identified and mapped. This knowledge can then be applied in the development of an effective conservation strategy. Based on molecular data obtained from 48 populations of T. wallichiana, we used GIS-based interpolation approach for the explicit visualization of patterns of genetic divergence and diversity, and a number of potential evolutionary hotspots have been specifically identified within the genetic landscape maps. Within the maps of genetic divergence and diversity, five areas of high inter-population genetic divergence and six areas of high intra-population genetic diversity have been highlighted in a number of separate mountain regions, and these evolutionary hotspots should have the priority to be protected. Furthermore, four geographical barriers have been identified: the eastern Himalayas, the Yunnan Plateau, the Hengduan Mountains and the Taiwan Strait. According to ecological niche modeling (ENM), the populations of T. wallichiana within the Sino-Himalayan Forest floristic subkingdom experienced westward expansion from the periods of Last Inter-glacial to Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Following the LGM, the distribution range overall became reduced and fragmented. These findings challenge the classic mode of contraction-expansion in response to the last glaciation. In conclusion, our findings suggest that the changes in geographical landscapes and climate that occurred during the Quaternary resulted in current genetic landscape patterns.

From the viewpoints of population, resources, environment and economic-social development, we establish the models of accounting for resource and environmental costs and coordinated (or relative coordinated) development degrees between economic growth and resources and the environment using the evaluation method of ecosystem service value. Synergistic effects between regional economic growth and resources and the environment in the Yangtze River Economic Zone was analyzed and driving forces were analyzed by regression of partial least squares. We found that from 1983 to 2012, resource and environmental costs in the Yangtze River Economic Zone (including seven provinces and two municipalities) increased from 4736.55 trillion CNY to 15 359.45 trillion CNY and corresponding weights dropped from 31.1% to 19.7% compared to the national level. The degree of coordinated development rose from 0.295 to 1.506, higher than the national average. In the years 1983, 1993 and 2003, the main factor that drove the coordinated development of regional economic growth, resources and the environment was low level resource and environmental costs. With continuous increases in primary and tertiary industrial added values after 2012, the advantage of the Yangtze River Economic Zone has weakened. In the future, provinces should improve the rules and regulations on planning and implementing main functional areas, promote adjustment of industrial structure, restore ecology, improve resource utilization efficiency and reduce environmental loss costs to enhance quality of economic development and promote the coordinated development of regional economic growth and resources and the environment.

Based on an urbanization research database, a bibliometric analysis of Chinese ecological environmental research on urbanization was conducted that examined output, focused fields, topics, theories and methods. Results show that research output in this field has been increasing since 2005. Land and industry fields in resource research, economics in ecological research, and climate and urban environments in environmental research have been studied from 1992–2011. Keywords analysis discovered that “Land Use” and “Heat Island Effect” were major keywords, making up 0.15% and 0.09% of the total frequency, respectively. “Heat Island Effect” and “Climate Change” were the most recent popular keywords. Main theories were derived from ecology, mathematics, resource environmental economics and environmental science. Ecological footprint has been a core theory since 2002. The stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence and technology model (STIRPAT), Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), and slope, land use map, excluded area, urban area, transportation map and hillside area model (SLEUTH) are the latest popular theories. During 1992–2011, the main research methods can be divided into four groups: statistics (65.17%), systems (13.11%), mechanisms (11.79%) and evaluation (9.93%). Grey System Analysis from system methods and rescaled range (R/S) analysis from evaluation are the latest popular methods. Topics from macro subfields, including land use, heat island effects, water resources and the agricultural ecological environment received more attention than micro subfields such as urban environmental health problems. As urbanization problems evolve, resource environmental economic comprehensive models will advance with modeling progress and some models, such as STIRPAT and land use change simulation models, will be developed for evaluation and simulation of the ecological environmental impacts of Chinese urbanization.

Eastern China's crude oil pipeline network is of the largest scale and freight volume in China. Here, we analyze 37 oil pipelines and one railway (38 oil flow channels), 20 oil fields with output of over a million tons of crude oil, and 32 refineries each of which refine over a million tons of crude oil. We construct a supply and demand balance sheet of oil sources and sinks by considering the transportation cost variance of variant pipeline diameters to determine the spatial optimization of Eastern China’s pipeline network. In 2009, the optimal cost of this network was 34.5% lower than the total actual cost, suggesting that oil flow is overall inefficient and there is huge potential to improve flow efficiency. Within Eastern China, the oil flow of the Northeast network was relatively better than others, but the flow in Northern China is inefficient because all pipelines are underload or noload, and there were similar conditions in the Huanghuai region. We assumed no difference in pipeline transport speed, compared to rail or road transportation, thus transportation distance, rather than time, is the main influential factor under the definite transporting cost of variant pipeline diameters.

The energy consumption of Chinas metropolitan areas has expanded from production areas to other areas such as the service area, and characteristics differ across small and medium-sized cities. Using the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) decomposition method, we conducted a factor decomposition analysis on changes in energy consumption for 32 Chinese metropolises from 1995–2012 that had a resident population of at least 1 million people in 1995. On the basis of a comprehensive consideration of urban economic growth, population expansion and spatial expansion, energy consumption factors can be decomposed into five indicators: economic scale, energy consumption per unit of output value, energy consumption per capita, population density and energy space support coefficient. We valued the contribution of each factor to metropolises' energy consumption to determine generality and regional differences.

Human-wildlife conflict is one of the biggest conservation challenges throughout the world. Various conservation strategies have been employed to limit these impacts, but often they are not adequately monitored and their effectiveness assessed. Recently, electric fencing has been constructed as a means to mitigate human-wildlife conflict surrounding many Nepalese protected areas. To date, there are no other studies analyzing the cost effectiveness and efficacy of fencing for conservation. This study aims to examine the cost effectiveness of electric fencing in the eastern sector of Chitwan National Park, Nepal, where the fencing has recently been constructed. Great Indian one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis), wild boar (Sus scrofa), Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), and tiger (Panthera tigris) were the main wildlife species involved in human-wildlife conflict in the buffer zone area surrounding the park, where the fencing was deployed. Electric fencing was significantly effective in reducing crop damage by 78% and livestock depredation by 30%–60%. Human mortality was not reduced significantly in the study areas and continued at low levels. Our analysis suggested that total net present value of the cost of electric fence in Kagendramalli User Committee (KMUC) and Mrigakunja User Committee (MKUC) was 1 517 959 NPR (Nepalese Rupees, 21 685 USD) and 3 530 075 NPR (50 429 USD) respectively up to the fiscal year 2009/10. Net present benefit in KMUC and MKUC was 16 301 105 NPR (232 872 USD) and 38 304 602 NPR (547 208 USD) respectively up to 2009/10. The cost-benefit ratio of electric fence up to base fiscal year 2009/10 in KMUC is 10.73, whereas MKUC is 10.85. These results illustrate that the electric fencing program is economically and socially beneficial in reducing human-wildlife conflict (crop damage and livestock depredation) around the protected areas where large mammals occur.

Here, we quantitatively determine temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of main grain crops in the West Liaohe River basin, Inner Mongolia, China, from 2000 to 2010 based on MODIS remote sensing data and NDVI time series information for the years 2000, 2005 and 2010. Phenological calendars and a decisionmaking tree extraction model were also used to obtain spatial distribution information of spring maize, spring wheat and soybean. We found that in 2010, the sown area of the main grain crops in the West Liaohe River basin was 11 965.08km², of which, the sown area for spring maize accounted for 92.28%and was concentrated in the lower reaches of the region. Spring wheat accounted for 3.14% and was mainly in the middle reaches. Soybean accounted for 4.58% and was predominantly in the upper reaches. From 2000 to 2005, the sown area of these grain crops in the West Liaohe River basin grew by 29.77%, mainly in the lower reaches: spring maize grew by 38.99%, spring wheat by 39.04% and soybean by 21.27%. From 2005 to 2010, growth in the sown area of these crops was slow (5.18% growth) and mainly in the lower reaches of the basin. The sown area of spring maize increased, but decreased for both spring wheat and soybean.

Air temperature is an important climatological variable and is usually measured in meteorological stations. Accurate mapping of its spatial and temporal distribution is of great interest for various scientific disciplines, but low station density and complexity of the terrain usually lead to significant errors and unrepresentative spatial patterns over large areas. Fortunately the current studies have shown that the regression models can help overcome the problem with the help of time series remote sensing data. However, noise induced by cloud contamination and other atmospheric disturbances variability impedes the application of LST data. An improved Savizky-Golay (SG) algorithm based on the LST background library is used in this paper to reconstruct MODIS LST product. Data statistical analysis included 12 meteorological stations and 120 reconstructed MODIS LST images of the period from 2001 to 2010. The coefficient of correlations (R²) for 80% of the stations was higher than 0.5 (below 0.5 for only 2 stations) which illustrated that there is a considerably close agreement between monthly mean TA (air temperature) and the reconstructed LST in the Lancang River basin. Comparing to the regression model for every month with only LST data, the regression model with LST and NDVI had higher R² and RMSE. Finally, the LST-NDVI regression method was applied as an estimate model to produce distributed maps of air temperature with month intervals and 1 km spatial in the Lancang River basin of 2010.

Effective programs and policies for cultivated land resource protection are often the focus of government policy-makers and researchers. Here we use survey data from Wuhan City, Hubei, China to attempt to apply a choice experiment for assessing main stakeholder preferences for cultivated land resource protection based on the hypothesis of market and policy. According to the basic principle of choice experiments, the area of cultivated land, quality of cultivated land, cost of cultivated land protection and cultivated land ecological landscape were included as attributes in the experimental design. Surveys were undertaken on two main stakeholders groups (farmers and urban residents). Our results show strong divergence between farmers and urban residents regarding protecting attributes. We then analyzed and compared welfare changes affected by different attribute combination programs. The result of this study provides theoretical and decision-making support for farmland protection funds and agricultural subsidy systems.

In this paper, we mainly focused our research on northern Shaanxi district, which is a pilot area of the Grain for Green Project. We compared the spatial distribution patterns of croplands and their productivity for the past 20 years (from the end of the 1980s to 2010). Cropland dynamics for the past 20 years were Interpreted from medium- and high-resolutlon remote sensing images (Landsat TM/ETM ). In addition, using the GLO-PEM and AGRO-VPM models with a medium resolution and long time series remote sensing dataset (AVHRR/MODIS), net primary productivity (NPP) and its relationship with cropland were estimated. Finally, the effect of cropland change on productivity was analyzed. The results show that during the first decade of the research period, cropland area and productivity in northern Shaanxi experienced a small boost, while in the latter decade, both cropland area and NPP were significantly reduced. The main cause of the increase in cropland was the reclamation of large area of grassland and unutilized land to meet the food demands of the local population as well as to compensate for the occupation of urban constructions. While the main cause of the decrease in cropland was the implementation of the Grain for Green Project. In addition, urbanization was also a key factor. Overall, during the past 20 years, the total area of cropland in northern Shaanxi decreased by 42.56%, and cropland NPP dropped by 41.90%. This study is of great importance for the assessment of regional cropland security, food security and scientific planning of regional land use.

We used panel data for 31 Chinese provinces from 2001 to 2009 and entropy methods to evaluate regional tourism resources endowment. Combined with regional tourism revenue, we constructed an asynchronous index and quantitatively evaluated every area's asynchronous phenomenon regarding tourism resources. We found that Chinese mainland tourism resources have asynchronous phenomenon: tourism is positively asynchronous in the east (Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin region) and negatively asynchronous in central and western China. The total efficiency of tourism resources in eastern China is mainly driven by pure technology efficiency and by scale efficiency in western China. In addition to some provinces, the ranking of provincial total efficiency and the asynchronous index has a strong positive correlation. We conclude with several suggestions for the development of tourism resources across China.