Industrial structure policies for specialty agriculture aim to optimize production, product, and industrial structures in China, yet their effect on land use performance through local government competitive actions remains underexplored. Using a balanced panel dataset covering 292 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2010 to 2023, this study treats China’s Agricultural Supply-Side Structural Reform (ASSR) as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a generalized difference-in-differences model to examine the effects and mechanisms of industrial structure policies on land use performance in specialty agriculture. The results indicate that industrial structure policies significantly improve land use performance in specialty agriculture, with local government competitive actions in product quality improvement, market channel development, and industrial integration serving as three important transmission mechanisms. In addition, the policy effect is particularly pronounced in non-provincial capital cities, non-major grain-producing areas, and regions southeast of China’s Hu Line, and stronger market integration further amplifies this effect. The study contributes a multidimensional land use performance framework and a local government competition channel for understanding how macro-level industrial policies translate into land use performance, with implications for differentiated land governance in developing economies.
The Pinglu Canal, the first river-to-sea canal project since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, reshapes basin-scale ecosystem services by altering land use/land cover, landscape patterns, and soil–water processes. This study assesses spatiotemporal variations in net primary production (NPP), soil conservation, water yield, and nitrogen/phosphorus output in the Pinglu Canal Basin from 2000 to 2024. Hotspot analysis, the interannual fluctuation index, Random Forest and Shapley additive explanations, climate–NPP residual analysis, and Geodetector were integrated. The results indicate that: (1) Over the past 25 years, ecosystem services have generally improved, with NPP increasing significantly and nitrogen/phosphorus outputs declining; northern hilly and low-mountain forests formed stable service supply areas, whereas water yield was more prominent in southern plains and river valleys. Water yield showed the strongest interannual fluctuation, while soil conservation remained relatively stable. (2) Hotspot stability was mainly regulated by population density, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), elevation, and precipitation, with evident nonlinear threshold effects. When the NDVI reaches about 0.63, the NPP and nutrient retention capacity are significantly enhanced, indicating that vegetation coverage and community structure can exert their ecological regulation functions effectively after reaching a certain level. (3) During construction, negative NPP disturbances expanded along the canal. The Geodetector results showed that while the explanatory power of population density was enhanced during the construction stage of the Pinglu Canal, precipitation, NDVI, and topographic/hydrothermal conditions remain foundational constraints for ecosystem services spatial differentiation. Furthermore, interactions, such as population–NDVI and population–precipitation, generally manifest as bivariate enhancement. This study supports ecological monitoring, risk warning, and zoned restoration for large linear infrastructure projects.
Maps actively produce places by highlighting certain features, prioritizing specific values, and downplaying others. Different mapping approaches are thus not only analytical but also carry profound political implications. Wilderness mapping, in particular, is inherently political, defining how wilderness is conceptualized, which areas are considered worthy of protection, and which are prioritized for development. This paper focuses on how different wilderness maps create distinct spatial realities and how they can be employed in political debates. Through a critical narrative review and comparative analysis, it examines how different mapping approaches and spatial representations of wilderness shape land-use planning and political perceptions, using a proposed hydropower plant in the Icelandic Central Highlands as a case study. The findings show that the estimated wilderness loss associated with the proposed plant varies substantially depending on the methodological approach, particularly concerning how disturbance, accessibility, and visibility are conceptualized. These differences are not merely technical but reflect contrasting interpretations regarding what constitutes wilderness and how it should be measured. Although the physical changes caused by development are measurable, the spatial extent classified as wilderness loss is not fixed because it depends on the mapping framework used to define and represent wilderness. Wilderness mapping therefore does not simply inform environmental assessment but actively shapes how impacts are interpreted, communicated, and debated. These findings elucidate the persistent tensions in wilderness governance worldwide, where competing spatial representations enable different policy positions to coexist.
Dryland reforestation and afforestation have expanded rapidly worldwide. Their success depends not only on tree establishment, but also on long-term persistence and goal attainment. Yet how well these dimensions are addressed across the full restoration trajectory remains unclear. Here, we developed a full restoration trajectory assessment framework and used LLM-assisted literature analysis to systematically evaluate 2362 empirical studies of dryland tree-based restoration. Our results showed substantial imbalances across the restoration trajectory. Research attention was uneven across restoration stages, with greater emphasis on degradation drivers and water constraints before restoration, and on early establishment rather than post-establishment management and long-term persistence during restoration. Goal–outcome alignment was high for major ecological objectives but substantially lower for socioeconomic goals, and cross-boundary effects were rarely considered. Together, these findings reveal that current research remains biased toward establishment and within-site outcomes, while ecological appropriateness, persistence, socioeconomic goal attainment, and broader spatial consequences receive comparatively limited attention. By quantitatively evaluating dryland tree-based restoration across the full restoration trajectory, our study identifies key evidence gaps and provides a framework for guiding restoration toward greater ecological appropriateness, long-term persistence, and goal-oriented evaluation.
Rural low-carbon planning requires evaluation tools that connect carbon-related performance with the ecological, socioeconomic, and infrastructure conditions of rural settlements, yet carbon inventories and conventional human-settlement assessments do not fully integrate these dimensions. This study developed an exploratory carbon-benefit-oriented sustainability diagnostic and applied it to Qingge Village, Fujian Province. Fuzzy Delphi screening retained 27 indicators across ecological, social, production, and engineering subsystems; Delphi consultation generated expert-based weights; a dimensionless ratio transformation standardized the indicator values; threshold, standardization, and weighting sensitivity analyses evaluated the stability of results across analytical specifications. The primary composite score was 0.413 compared with 0.590 under the target-achievement transformation, and both expert-weighted transformations ranked subsystem contributions as production, ecological, social, and engineering. The ecological and production subsystems performed more strongly against the selected references than the social and engineering subsystems, whereas fully equal global weights placed ecology ahead of production. The principal diagnostic priorities were household energy emissions, green agricultural upgrading, public-transport access, and recorded energy-efficient building coverage. These findings indicate that the diagnostic can organize village-scale low-carbon planning priorities and translate multidimensional performance evidence into a sequenced set of spatial improvement options. This study therefore provides a transparent and practically applicable approach for linking carbon-related indicators with rural human-settlement planning and supporting evidence-informed low-carbon revitalization.
