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The ability to quickly and non-destructively monitor the cadmium (Cd) content in agricultural crops is the basic premise of effective prevention and control of Cd contamination in agricultural products. Hyperspectral technology provides a solution for this issue. The potential capability for the spectral prediction of the Cd content in the leaves of pepper and eggplant in the field was explored, and a spectral prediction model of the Cd content in these leaves was established. In this study, based on the indoor spectrum, the sensitive wavebands for predicting the Cd content in leaves were determined preliminarily by correlation analysis. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) and support vector machine regression (SVMR) were used to establish spectral prediction models, and the final sensitive wavebands were determined by the size of the model index. The results show that the SVMR model exhibited higher prediction accuracy than the PLSR model. The RPDp (relative percent different of prediction set) values of the best SVMR prediction models for the pepper leaves and the eggplant leaves were 1.82 and 1.49, respectively. The values of Rp2 (coefficient of determination of prediction set), which can quantitatively estimate the Cd content in leaves, were 0.897 (p < 0.01) and 0.726 (p < 0.01), respectively. This study demonstrated that the leaf spectra of pepper and eggplant in the field can be used to predict the Cd content in leaves, providing a reference for monitoring the Cd content in the fruits of pepper and eggplant in the future.

Conventional models to support policymaking for the energy sector have been largely based on deterministic or static settings that focus on planning welfare- maximising investment pathways. But, in a liberalised market, since investments are made by competitive, profit-maximising companies, the increased intervention of government policy in the trading arrangements creates uncertain responses to incentives. Industry may perceive policy risks to be high, and major companies may choose to act more cautiously than governments expect. This presents a modelling challenge, and we propose an extension to the use of real options in this context. We model several features of the low-carbon investment context, viz., irreversibility, delay, and competition, which impinge upon the radical policy imperatives for structural change in electricity markets to meet ambitious sustainability targets.

Environmental pollution damages public health and affects economic development. Environmental regulation is the main way for the government to solve environmental pollution. So what type of environmental regulation works better for public health and economic development? Can environmental regulation have an influence on economic development through public health? To solve these problems, this research uses China’s provincial panel data from 2013 to 2017 to divide environmental regulation into command-control policy tools and economic incentive policy tools and uses the mediating effect model to examine the relationship among environmental regulation, public health and economic development. The results show that: (1) There is a positive correlation between economic incentive policy tools and economic development; while no significant relationship between command-control policy tools and economic development is founded; (2) The relationship between command-control policy tools and public health is not significant, while the relationship between economic incentive policy tools and public health is positive; (3) Public health does not play a mediating role between command-control policy tools and economic development but plays a partial mediating role between economic incentive policy tools and economic development. Therefore, the government should strengthen the use of economic incentive policy tools to promote public health and sustainable economic development.

This article undertakes a ‘backcasting’ analysis exploring strategic approaches for overall systems sustainability in personal transport. Starting from a robust definition of sustainability for the...

With rapid changes and increasing uncertainty in the market environment, enterprise innovation ecosystems (EIEs) have increasingly been promoted in the past decade. Nevertheless, research on EIEs has fallen into a fuzzy state. Scholars have scattered views on the subject and have not systematically classified it, leading to a discussion regarding its conceptual rigor and comprehensive analysis. The purpose of this article is to conduct integrative research on EIEs and to examine all the relevant issues of existing views. This study screened all relevant topics in the past decade through the WOS database and identified significant journal articles. By reviewing and sorting out the relevant thematic literature from 2011 to 2020 and performing keyword cluster analysis, the research focus and hot spots of EIEs are determined. The entity structure, main types, dynamic mechanism, and evolution mechanism of EIEs were elaborated, and the definition of an EIE is finally determined. Through an analysis of the emerging viewpoints of EIEs, the hot spots of this topic are discussed. These streams provide opportunities for further research to consolidate the concepts of EIEs.

In this study, we investigate whether outbound foreign direct investment (OFDI) either augments or impedes domestic public and private investment, incorporating the role of institutional quality into the context of developed and emerging countries. To this end, we apply a cross-sectional-autoregressive-distributed lag (CS-ARDL) approach to analyze panel data from the period 1996–2017. Our empirical findings suggest that OFDI augments private capital formation for developed countries. Institutional quality (IQ) is found to be a driving factor that promotes private capital formation in the established economies of developed countries. However, OFDI has a negative association with the public capital formation in the established economies of developed countries, while IQ has a positive association with it. In the context of emerging economies, OFDI is found to be too insignificant to have an effect on private and public capital formation. Interestingly, IQ has a detrimental effect on both private and public capital formation in emerging economies. Our findings are robust. The empirical findings of this study imply that institutional quality should continue to be improved in developed countries, while it should surpass a certain threshold for emerging economies to promote domestic capital formation.

A comprehensive evaluation model that combines an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method and the improved version of the Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC) method is proposed to solve integrated assessment problems related to the service status of groins in waterways. In view of the influencing factors and functional characteristics of damaged groins for waterway regulation, a waterway groin service status (WGSS) evaluation index system with a hierarchical structure was constructed using target-criteria elements. Additionally, based on the multi-attribute characteristics of the indicators, standards for rating and assigning values to elemental indicators were developed. Considering that traditional empowerment methods are rather one-sided and limited, an AHP-improved CRITIC method combination assigning optimization model was established based on the least squares principle, and the optimal combination weights were solved by the Lagrange multiplier method. The reliability and applicability of the model were tested by successfully applying the evaluation model to the comprehensive evaluation of the service status of spur dikes in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. The results showed that the combined weights that were calculated by the AHP and the improved CRITIC optimization model were able to reflect both subjective and objective information, which makes up for the shortcomings of a single assignment method, and the weights assigned to the service status evaluation indexes for groins were reasonable. The comprehensive evaluation method to determine the service status of groins proposed in this paper was more accurate than the traditional evaluation method with subjective assignment and provided a scientific basis for decision making to maintain the sustainability of groin function.

As it is widely accepted, cycling tends to produce health benefits and reduce air pollution. Policymakers encourage people to use bikes by improving cycling facilities as well as developing bicycle-sharing systems (BSS). It is increasingly interesting to investigate how environmental factors influence the cycling behavior of users of bicycle-sharing systems, as users of bicycle-sharing systems tend to be different from regular cyclists. Although earlier studies have examined effects of safety and convenience on the cycling behavior of regular riders, they rarely explored effects of safety and convenience on the cycling behavior of BSS riders. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to investigate how road safety, convenience, and public safety affect the cycling behavior of BSS riders by controlling for other environmental factors. Specifically, in this study, we investigated the impacts of environmental characteristics, including population density, employment density, land use mix, accessibility to point-of-interests (schools, shops, parks and gyms), road infrastructure, public transit accessibility, road safety, convenience, and public safety on the usage of BSS. Additionally, for a more accurate measure of public transit accessibility, road safety, convenience, and public safety, we used spatiotemporally varying measurements instead of spatially varying measurements, which have been widely used in earlier studies. We conducted an empirical investigation in Chicago with cycling data from a BSS called Divvy. In this study, we particularly attempted to answer the following questions: (1) how traffic accidents and congestion influence the usage of BSS; (2) how violent crime influences the usage of BSS; and (3) how public transit accessibility influences the usage of BSS. Moreover, we tried to offer implications for policies aiming to increase the usage of BSS or for the site selection of new docking stations. Empirical results demonstrate that density of bicycle lanes, public transit accessibility, and public safety influence the usage of BSS, which provides answers for our research questions. Empirical results also suggest policy implications that improving bicycle facilities and reducing the rate of violent crime rates tend to increase the usage of BSS. Moreover, some environmental factors could be considered in selecting a site for a new docking station.