How should rural development be chosen? The mechanism narration of rural regional function: A case study of Gansu Province, China.

Several major changes in China's land policy, economic system, and development strategy have contributed to the continuous transformation of rural patterns and urban-rural relations. The deepening of urban-rural interaction has led to an increasing complexity of rural territorial functions, and the importance of territorial multifunctional mechanisms in the dynamic process of rural development in China has been highlighted. However, the current choice of a rural development model lacks comprehensive thinking that combines the functional mechanisms of rural areas with the elements of the development environment. In this paper, we define and identify the functions of rural areas in Gansu Province, China, and analyze and construct a rural development model by analyzing the interaction between the mechanisms of rural regional functions and the "rural revitalization" strategy. We find that under the control of "rural revitalization," a sustainable development tool, the countryside is constantly developing into a multifunctional complex, and its development mode should be dynamically adjusted according to functional changes. Finally, we summarize the general evolutionary cycle of the multifunctional system of rural regions and attempt to extrapolate the dynamic developmental village type classification process of "rural revitalization" from the perspective of rural regional functions in China.

Analysis of Landscape Characteristics and Influencing Factors of Residential Areas on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau: A Case Study of Tibet, China.

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is the largest ecological barrier and one of the most vulnerable areas of the ecological environmental system. However, the increasing frequency of human activities in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has led to strong interference. Residential areas are the main places in which human activities are carried out and, as such, can effectively reflect the intensity of activities. Based on this, this research takes the Tibet Autonomous Region as the study area and analyzes the distribution characteristics of Tibetan residential areas using Zipf's law and various landscape indices, as well as discussing the influences of altitude, hydrology, ecological environment, and location on residential area distribution. The obtained results indicate the following: (1) The residential areas in Tibet basically conform to the rank-size principle. The residential areas in central and northwest Tibet are concentrated in size distribution, and the relatively large residential areas are prominent, while the residential areas in the eastern Hengduan mountain region are relatively balanced in size distribution. (2) The landscape index results demonstrate that the counties with an unbalanced distribution of residential areas are mainly concentrated in the northwest of Tibet, while the residential areas in the counties and regions where the administrative stations of each prefecture-level city (or region) are located tend to present a polarization phenomenon, with large patches. The area distribution of residential areas showed a "medium-high-low" pattern from southeast to northwest. The residential areas in eastern Tibet have a high degree of fragmentation and a low degree of aggregation, while the residential areas in northwest Tibet have a low degree of fragmentation and a relatively high degree of aggregation. (3) The residential areas in Tibet are most concentrated in the altitude range of 3000-5000 m above sea level and their water affinity and road-affinity are strong, with the distribution of residential areas within 500 m of roads and water networks accounting for more than one-quarter. The vegetation coverage in the residential areas is low, inconsistent with the surface vegetation coverage rate over the whole of Tibet.

An International Comparative Study on the Resilience of Urban Communities after COVID-19 Pandemic: A One-Year Case Study between Lanzhou, China and Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

After the prevailing of the COVID-19 pandemic, urban communities around the world took initiatives to bring their cities back to life. In this research, 45 indicators and 55 elements were selected to make comparisons between urban communities in Lanzhou, China and Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina from five dimensions of social resilience, economic resilience, institutional resilience, infrastructural resilience, and community capital resilience. At the same time, the ArcGIS platform tool was used for spatial interpolation analysis. In this paper, the inverse distance weighting (IDW) method was used to carry out the spatial analysis of the perceived resilience of the two cities. Due to the heterogeneity of the neighborhood physical environment, operation and management mode, individual attribute characteristics, and internal relations, the resilience of the two urban communities showed disparity in different dimensions. Overall, the communities with good urban property management services, high-income owners, and the convenient transportation have stronger resilience in the face of pandemic. On the contrary, scattered communities, which are scattered in the inner cities, lack effective management, and based on unstable employment, people become the most affected by the epidemic with the lowest resilience power. The importance of social capital, represented by community understanding, identity, and mutual help and cooperation between neighbors, is highlighted in the resilience assessment of the two cities, respectively, in the East and West, indicating that to build more resilient cities, in addition to improving government management and increasing investment in urban infrastructure, building the residents' sense of belonging, identity, and enduring community culture is even more important in the construction of resilient cities.

Simulation and optimization of land use pattern to embed ecological suitability in an oasis region: A case study of Ganzhou district, Gansu province, China.

High-intensity land use has led to water resource imbalance and land degradation in oasis regions, which pose a great threat to ecological security. Optimization of land use patterns is crucial to ensuring the rational distribution of water and land resources and improving the stability of oasis ecosystems. The purpose of this study is to spatially allocate land use activities to more suitable regions. In this study, we first evaluated the land ecological suitability (LES) in Ganzhou District, a typical oasis region. Then, the LES evaluation results were embedded in an integrated CA-Markov model based on multiple criteria evaluation (MCE) and multi-objective land allocation (MOLA) to simulate and optimize land use patterns for the year 2025 under two scenarios, i.e., Business as Usual (BAU) and Land Ecological Optimization (LEO). The results revealed that the optimized land use pattern generated by LES was more reasonable. The growth rate of construction land was restricted, and a slightly increased area of construction land mainly occupied unused land. Farmland area had a decreasing trend, and was mainly converted to grassland. Moreover, the woodland and water areas had increasing trends. This study can serve as a scientific reference for planners and policy makers in formulating land use planning and land use resource management strategies in oasis regions.

Ecological and human health risk assessments in the context of soil heavy metal pollution in a typical industrial area of Shanghai, China.

The purpose of this study was to identify the concentrations, sources, and potential ecological and health risks of heavy metals in soils from a typical industrial area in Shanghai, China. A total of 28 surface soil samples were collected and analyzed for As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Pb, Ni, Zn, and Hg from the BAO steel industry in June and July 2016. Classic multivariate statistical and geostatistical analysis methods were used to detect the sources of heavy metals, and the ecological risk index (RI) and hazard index (HI) were calculated to assess the potential ecological and health risks. The results showed significant pollution levels, which were derived from the industrial production process and closely related to the spatial layout of the functional areas of the industry. The ecological risk assessment indicated that a very high concentration zone with values ranging from 2045 to 3417 mg kg-1 represented considerable ecological risk in the range of 300 to 600. The main dominant factor affecting the ecological risk is toxicity rather than concentration. The health risk assessment indicated that noncarcinogenic risk was mainly caused by Cr, and the average HI value for adults was 6.48, while it was 39.01 for children. Thus, children face higher threats to heavy metals in soils. The average carcinogenic risk values for Ni, Cr, Cd, and As were 7.97E-09, 5.2E-07, 2.1E-10, and 2.1E-09, respectively, all of which were below the threshold values (1.0E - 04). These results provide basic information for the control and environmental management of heavy metal pollution in steel industrial regions.