(Press-News.org)
Quality is the core characteristic of cultivated land and is crucial for ensuring sustainable resource utilization and national food security. To meet the increasing demand for food driven by rapid population growth and the continual optimization of dietary structures, the intensity of cultivated land utilization has been steadily increasing. This trend has resulted in degradation issues such as deterioration of black soil, thinning of the cultivated land layer, reduction in organic matter content, soil salinization, acidification, and contamination by heavy metals, all of which threaten national food security. Currently, China has entered a critical period of agricultural modernization and ecological civilization construction. It is essential to deeply understand the connotations of cultivated land quality in the context of the new era, assess the current status of cultivated land quality, establish goals for enhancing cultivated land quality, and implement differentiated measures for improving cultivated land quality. These are urgent scientific questions that need to be addressed.
To address the scientific question above, Professor Kong Xiangbin’s team from China Agricultural University provided a systematic and scientific explanation based on theoretical research and field investigations on evaluation of cultivated land quality, sustainable use of cultivated land. The attributes of cultivated land quality can be considered in four dimensions: suitability, contiguity, resilience, and ecological stress. Among these, suitability is the natural productivity of cultivated land determined by climatic conditions, topography, soil physicochemical and biological traits; contiguity is the shape of cultivated land parcels and the degree of concentration and contiguity, and characterizes the ability of cultivated land to satisfy the degree of convenience of human cultivation and the mechanization of agriculture; resilience is mainly determined by the conditions of cultivated land infrastructure, which characterizes the ability of cultivated land to resist external disasters and other perturbations in the production of cultivated land; and ecological stress is the extent to which cultivated land is subjected to soil heavy metal pollution, groundwater overexploitation, and soil erosion, which characterizes the sustainability of environmentally-sustainable production of cultivated land.
The study found that the suitability of cultivated land in China showed a decreasing trend from east to west. Fifty percent of the cultivated land in China was highly suitable cultivated land, mainly occurring in the middle-lower Yangtze Plain, southern and eastern parts of the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain, eastern and northwestern parts of the Northeast China Plain, the Sichuan Basin and surrounding regions. The contiguity of cultivated land in China showed a decreasing trend from northeast to southwest, poor contiguity of cultivated land mainly occurred on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, in southern China, on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and on the south and northwest of the Loess Plateau. Highly resistance cultivated land is mainly distributed in the three major plains, while weakly resistance cultivated land is predominantly found in mountainous and hilly areas in China. The cultivated land with ecological stress of in China widely occurring in various agricultural areas, mostly the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain, the northern arid and semiarid region, the Northeast China Plain, the Loess Plateau and the Sichuan Basin and surrounding areas.
Based on the current situation of cultivated land quality and the strategic needs of national high-quality development, China’s future goals for improving cultivated land quality include four aspects: promoting the sustainable use of resources, improving the economic benefits of farming, coping with extreme meteorological disasters, and meeting the transition of the food system.
Against the backdrop of a volatile international environment and high domestic demand for food, China should guarantee a safe supply of staples, a stable supply of animal feed, and a moderate supply of high-nutrient food. In the future, China should create three major food production spaces: high-standard, low-to medium-yield, and marginal cultivated land. China urgently needs to construct three paths to implement the goal of improving cultivated land quality, namely the development of high-standard cultivated land with the core of spatial optimization, resilience enhancement and scale coupling, the transformation of low- to medium-yield cultivated land with the core of obstacle elimination, tenure adjustment, ecological sustainable, and the conservation development of marginal cultivated land with a focus on sustainable use.
This study summarized the connotations of cultivated land quality under the new era context, analyzed the current status of cultivated land quality, proposed goals for cultivated land quality construction, and constructs a differentiated path for cultivated land quality construction that can achieve synergies among improving cultivated land quality, ensuring national food security, and protecting the ecological environment. This study has been published on the Journal of Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering in 2024, 11(2) DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2023523.
END
New research led by UCLA Health revealed that Black patients with Huntington's disease in the U.S. and Canada received their diagnoses, on average, one year later compared to White patients after symptoms first appear.
Huntington’s disease is a rare, incurable genetic disease that causes a gradual death of nerve cells, resulting in a variety of symptoms affecting movement, emotions and cognition. About 41,000 Americans have the disease and 200,000 are at risk of inheriting it, according to the Huntington’s Disease Society of America. Children of a parent with ...
A trove of ancient plant remains excavated in Kenya helps explain the history of plant farming in equatorial eastern Africa, a region long thought to be important for early farming but where scant evidence from actual physical crops has been previously uncovered.
In a new study published July 10 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, archaeologists from Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Pittsburgh and their colleagues report the largest and most extensively dated archaeobotanical record from interior east Africa.
Up until now, scientists have ...
A longitudinal study by University of Queensland researchers has found high-intensity interval exercise improves brain function in older adults for up to 5 years.
Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr Daniel Blackmore from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute led the study in which volunteers did physical exercise and had brain scans.
Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr Daniel Blackmore have shown high intensity exercise boosts cognition in healthy older adults and the improvement was retained for up to 5 years.
Emeritus Professor Bartlett said it is the first ...
LA JOLLA, CA—Even years after they have recovered, a person who once struggled with alcohol or opioid addiction can relapse—and that relapse is more likely to occur during particularly stressful times. Now, Scripps Research scientists have identified an area of the brain that plays a key role in stress-induced oxycodone relapse. Their findings explain why the drug suvorexant, which they previously found to reduce alcohol and oxycodone relapse when administered orally, works so well.
“Having a better understanding of the region(s) in the brain responsible for this kind of relapse is incredibly important as we develop treatments for alcohol use disorder and opioid ...
Daily sugar intake fell by around 5 g in children and by around 11 g in adults in the 12 months following the introduction of the UK’s ‘sugar tax’, formally known as the Soft Drinks Industry Levy, finds an analysis of 11 years of survey data, published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.
The sugar from soft drinks alone made up over half this total, the estimates suggest. But overall daily energy intake from free sugars levels are still higher than the updated recommendation from the World Health Organisation (WHO) of 5%---equivalent to 30 g/day for adults, 24 g for 7–10 year olds, and 19 g for 4–6 year olds—point ...
Osteoarthritis—a condition in which the protective cartilage on the ends of bones breaks down—may more than double the risk of speedy progression to accumulating severe long term conditions (multimorbidity), finds a 20 year study published in the open access journal RMD Open.
And there seem to be 4 different speeds of progression to multimorbidity, the findings indicate.
Persistently low levels of physical activity, a high calorie diet, plus chronic low grade inflammation may help to explain the link between osteoarthritis and the risk of accumulating other long term conditions, suggest the researchers.
Although the exact causes aren’t known, injury, age, family ...
Researchers from Konstanz have measured the heart rate of bats over several days in the wild, including complete flights—the first time this has been done for a bat species. To record the heart rate of male common noctule bats during flight, the scientists attached heart rate transmitters weighing less than one gram to the animals, which they then accompanied in an airplane while the bats flew, sometimes for more than an hour, in search of food. Their results, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show how much energy bats consume over the course of a day and what energy-saving strategies they ...
Women who have close family members with endocrine diseases, including type 2 diabetes, thyroid diseases and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), are at higher risk of pregnancy loss, a new study has found [1].
The research, presented today at the ESHRE 40th Annual Meeting in Amsterdam, examined the association between various endocrine diseases and the incidence of pregnancy loss. The study investigated 366,539 women in Denmark between 1973 and 2022.
The study found that women with parents diagnosed with endocrine diseases faced a 6% higher risk of pregnancy loss ...
The Buck Institute for Research on Aging announces the appointment of Nathan Price, PhD, to Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Human Healthspan. Price specializes in systems biology, artificial intelligence, and bioengineering. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and is co-author, with Buck Chief Innovation Officer and Distinguished Professor Lee Hood, of “The Age of Scientific Wellness.” Price has been named one of 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine and is a member of the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Dr. Price is Chief Scientific Officer ...
There is a pressing need for countries and international organisations to understand better how existing international law can help them address serious concerns about the militarisation of outer space, a new study says.
Space ...
