Reforestation is a critical means of addressing the environmental and social problems of deforestation. China’s Grain-for-Green Program (GFGP) is the world’s largest reforestation scheme. Here we provide the first nationwide assessment of the tree composition of GFGP forests and the first combined ecological and economic study aimed at understanding GFGP’s biodiversity implications. Across China, GFGP forests are overwhelmingly monocultures or compositionally simple mixed forests.

Energy harvesting performance of an efficient flexible bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator (BPNG) is demonstrated, where “bio-waste” transparent fish scale (FSC), composed of self-assembled and ordered collagen nano-fibrils, serves as a self-poled piezoelectric active component, exhibiting intrinsic piezoelectric strength of −−5.0 pC/N. The dipolar orientation (∼19%) of the self-polarized FSC collagen is confirmed by the angular dependent near edge X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy.

Recent studies have revealed that some mammals possess adaptations that enable them to produce vocal signals with much lower fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequency spacing (ΔF) than expected for their size. Although these adaptations are assumed to reflect selection pressures for males to lower frequency components and exaggerate body size in reproductive contexts, this hypothesis has not been tested across a broad range of species.

Over the last two decades, ovarian cancer mortality rates have levelled or declined. There are, however, persisting and substantial differences in ovarian cancer patterns and trends. Researchers updated global trends in ovarian cancer mortality to 2012, and predicted trends in rates to 2020 using data from the World Health Organization database.

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Soil moisture supply and atmospheric demand for water independently limit—and profoundly affect—vegetation productivity and water use during periods of hydrologic stress. Disentangling the impact of these two drivers on ecosystem carbon and water cycling is difficult because they are often correlated, and experimental tools for manipulating atmospheric demand in the field are lacking. Consequently, the role of atmospheric demand is often not adequately factored into experiments or represented in models.

Recent work suggests that episodes of drought and heat can bring forests across climate zones to a threshold for massive tree mortality. As complex systems approach a threshold for collapse they tend to exhibit a loss of resilience, as reflected in declining recovery rates from perturbations. Trees may be no exception, as at the verge of drought-induced death, trees are found to be weakened in multiple ways, affecting their ability to recover from stress.

Aging infrastructure coupled with growing interest in river restoration has driven a dramatic increase in the practice of dam removal. With this increase, there has been a proliferation of studies that assess the physical and ecological responses of rivers to these removals. As more dams are considered for removal, scientific information from these dam-removal studies will increasingly be called upon to inform decisions about whether, and how best, to bring down dams.

There is an ongoing debate on whether the observed decadal variations in surface solar radiation, known as "dimming and brightening", are a global or just local phenomenon. We investigated this issue using a comprehensive set of long-term sunshine duration records from China, which experienced a rapid growth in urbanization during past decades. 172 pairs of urban and nearby rural stations were analyzed over the period 1960–1989 ("dimming phase") and 1990–2013 ("brightening phase").

The year 1980 has often been used as a benchmark for the return of Antarctic ozone to conditions assumed to be unaffected by emissions of ozone depleting substances (ODSs), implying that anthropogenic ozone depletion in Antarctica started around 1980. Here, the extent of anthropogenically-driven Antarctic ozone depletion prior to 1980 is examined using output from transient Chemistry-Climate Model (CCM) simulations from 1960 to 2000 with prescribed changes of ozone depleting substance concentrations in conjunction with observations.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has embarked on a new era of dam building to improve food security and promote economic development. Nonetheless, the future impacts of dams on malaria transmission are poorly understood and seldom investigated in the context of climate and demographic change.

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