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The study of urban morphology contributes to the evolution of cities and sustainable development. Urban morphological feature extraction and similarity analysis represents a practical framework in many studies to interpret and introduce the current built environment to aid in proposing novel designs. In conventional methods, morphological features are represented based on qualitative descriptions, symbolical interpretation, or manually selected indicators. However, these methods could cause subjective bias and limit the generalizability. This study proposes a hybrid data-driven approach to support quantitative morphological descriptions and multi-dimensional similarity analysis for urban design decision-making and to further morphology-related studies using information abundance via a deep-learning approach. We constructed a dataset of 3817 residential plots with geometrical and related infrastructure information. A deep convolutional neural network, GoogLeNet, was implemented with the plots’ figure–ground images, by quantifying the morphological features into 2048-dimensional feature vectors. We conducted a similarity analysis of the plots by calculating the Euclidean distance between the high-dimensional feature vectors. Then, a comparison study was performed by retrieving cases based on the plot shape and plots with buildings separately. The proposed method considers the overall characteristics of the urban morphology and social infrastructure situations for similarity analysis. This method is flexible and effective. The proposed framework indicates the feasibility and potential of integrating task-oriented information to introduce custom and adequate references via deep learning methods, which could support decision making and association studies on morphology with urban consequences. This work could serve as a basis for further typo-morphology studies and other morphology-related ecological, social, and economic studies for sustainable built environments.

Increasing urbanization in China threatens the sustainable rural development of villages and towns. The siphoning effect of cities on the surrounding rural areas is increasing, resulting in the more severe problem of a “rural disease” and a widening gap between urban and rural areas. Implementing China’s rural revitalization strategies for urban–rural integration to alleviate these problems is crucial for sustainable rural development. Based on field research materials from Wujiang District, Suzhou City, China, this paper uses an explanatory structural model to screen the factors influencing sustainable rural development. A system dynamics model is used to identify the sustainable rural development trends of Chinese villages and towns under different scenarios. The results demonstrate that under the sustainable development model, consolidating the development of primary industries and increasing tertiary section investments can promote the development of the local economy. These are also conducive to environmental protection, and they improve the quality of the local living environment. The results can be used to formulate rural revitalization policies and promote urban–rural integration.

The changes in niche roles and functions caused by competition for survival resources have implications in various domains, with natural science and social science standing out. Currently, expanding the ecological niche concept and its practical interpretation in the fields of social ecology, geography and sustainable science is becoming a crucial challenge. This paper is based on niche theory to observe niche evolution and resulting socio-ecological effects of 1186 towns in 19 prefecture cities in Yangtze River delta. The results indicate that: Towns around the Taihu Lake displayed obvious spatial agglomeration, which was leading the development of the entire region. The town niche shows obvious characteristics of north-south differences and hierarchy distribution. The niche coordination degree of Jiangsu Province was higher than that of Zhejiang Province. The higher the subsystem coordination degree, the better the town development. Towns with poor ecological conditions are often subject to competition, while towns with better ecological conditions often benefit from cooperative development. The niche separation and collaboration could enhance niche competition of towns and cities in the region. The proposed framework can facilitate interdisciplinary exchanges among geography, sociology, landscape ecology and regional planning and provide insights for understanding regional co-opetition relationship and regional sustainable development.

Agricultural labor productivity is an important indicator that reflects the sustainable development of agriculture and rural areas. Demonstration farms provide an important link between small-scale farmers and modern agriculture in mountainous area of western China, which is playing an important role in improving labor productivity. This paper focuses on using the PSM-logit model and sensitivity analysis to empirically test the causal relationship between demonstration farms and labor productivity, and a micro-large sample of 1823 family farms was adopted. The highlighted findings are as follows: the average labor productivity of the demonstration farm is 2.8 times higher than that of the non-demonstration farm. There is a significant positive correlation between demonstration farms and labor productivity. Utilizing demonstration farms, when all control variables are added, can remarkably promote farm income by CNY301458 on average. In the matched sample, and under scenarios controlling for other covariates, we saw that demonstration farms can significantly enhance the farm income of CNY285108, CNY288509, and CNY291077 on average, respectively, after taking the radius matching, the kernel matching, and the nearest neighbor matching. The research inspired us to enhance the demonstrative establishment of family farms and accelerate the rate at which comprehensive development benefits are derived from demonstration farms. The results of this research could provide a policy reference for the promotion of high-quality development and the sustainable development of family farms in China and serve as an experience reference for promoting sustainable development of agriculture and rural areas globally.

Urbanization affects the microclimate and forms a unique urban climate environment. To deepen the understanding on the microclimate regulation function of an urban wetland, this study analyzed the influence of a suburb wetland’s urbanization process on the local climate through contrast observations of the protected wetland area and the former wetland area in Xixi wetland. Results show that the urbanization of suburb wetlands has an impact on the local microclimate and decreases human comfort, and that wetlands can effectively regulate the microclimate. The fragmentation of urban wetlands caused by urban sprawl decreases their microclimate regulation function, a decrease that is particularly evident in summer. Additionally, wetlands stabilize the microclimate in all seasons. For every land cover type in wetlands, vegetation has a better stabilizing effect on temperature, whereas a water body has a better stabilizing effect on wind speed and humidity. Meteorological conditions also affect the microclimate regulation function of wetlands. Temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and wind speed influence the cooling function of urban wetlands, while solar radiation modifies the humidifying function of urban wetlands.

Various industrial activities contribute heavy metals to terrestrial ecosystems. In order to evaluate the soil quality of industrial areas and to identify the potential phytoremediator from the native plant species, we collected 45 surface soil samples and 21 plant species in a typical industrial area of northwestern China. The results showed that the average values of the Cd, Cr, As, Pb, Cu, and Zn in the soils were 36.91, 1.67, 7.20, 1.38, 1.27, and 6.66 times, respectively, compared with the corresponding background values. The average single factor pollution index for heavy metals decreased in the order of Cd > As > Zn > Cr > Cu > Pb. The study area was seriously polluted by Cd and As, slightly polluted by Zn, and had relatively little contamination by Cr, Pb, and Cu. In terms of the average Nemerow synthetic pollution index in every sampling site, 97.78% of the samples were seriously polluted and 2.22% of the samples were moderately polluted, which indicated that almost all of the samples in the industrial area were seriously polluted. The results of the biomass, heavy metal concentrations, bioconcentration factors (BCF), and translocation factors (TF) for the native plants showed that Achnatherum splendens for metal Cr presented a phytostabilization potential, Artemisia scoparia and Echinochloa crusgalli for metal Cu and Halogeton arachnoideus for metal Zn presented a phytoextraction potential, and all of the studied plants were limited as phytoremediators for Cd or Pb contaminated soil.

The construction of green infrastructure (GI) plays an important role in improving the rural ecological functions and building a green livable environment. In this paper, the methods of morpho spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) and space syntax analysis are used to study the GI network construction in Suining County, Jiangsu Province. The results show that: (1) In 2018, the area of ecological patches increased by 110% compared with 1998, and the utilization rate of the GI network was significantly improved. (2) A total of 66 ecological corridors were analyzed in the county, and the main corridors were distributed in the central and western regions. The correlation analysis of core ecological patches in 1998, 2008, and 2018 proved that location factors had the greatest impact on the results of function and connectivity. (3) According to the optimization results, ecological benefits can be improved through engineering measures to realize the revitalization and development of regional rural areas.

Several studies have identified threats that originate in areas surrounding protected areas (PAs). While there have been various efforts to integrate PAs with their surroundings, considerable challenges remain. Here we summarize these efforts to date, discuss their effectiveness, and provide recommendations for future research. Based on a broad literature review of theoretical and applied approaches, we have outlined 68 models for balancing conservation and sustainable development in PAs. We comprehensively analyzed 23 of these models for integrating PAs with their surroundings. They were divided into two categories: area-oriented and process-oriented approaches. This review reveals the absolute necessity of combining these two approaches for future conservation and sustainable development of PAs.