Explore the vast range of titles available.

As a critical component of the geographical divide between the northern and southern regions of China, the ecological stability of the Qinling region has profound implications for ecological balance within China and across East Asia. However, the degradation risk areas of the Qinling region remain unclear, and there are gaps in the delineation of key ecological protection areas. This study examines the improvement and decline in the Qinling region from 2000 to 2023 in terms of ecosystem patterns, quality, and functions. Moreover, key ecological function and degradation risk zones were identified, and future development paths were proposed for the Qinling region. The findings indicate that: (1) Urban area expansion was the most rapid, increasing by about 1800 km², with an average yearly growth rate of 2.43%. Ecosystem quality increased in 48.07% of the Qinling region. The degradation risk zones of ecosystem quality and function were primarily located in the Sanjiangyuan, the Minshan-Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi, Henan, and Gansu. The core areas for water and soil conservation only accounted for 17.92% and 10.47%, respectively, mainly distributed across the Qinling-Daba Mountains. Based on ecological patterns, quality, functions, and ecological protection and restoration projects, the Qinling region has been divided into two majority categories and 16 subcategories: 7 ecologically key functional areas and 9 degradation risk areas. This study offers recommendations for formulating ecological protection and restoration policies, thereby promoting the sustainable development of the region’s ecology and economy.

Ecological engineering can significantly improve ecosystem carbon sequestration. However, few studies have projected the carbon sink trends in regions where ecological engineering projects overlap and have not considered the different climate change conditions and land use scenarios. Using the ensemble empirical mode decomposition method and machine learning algorithms (enhanced boosted regression trees), the aims of this study to elucidate the stability of carbon sinks and their driving mechanisms in areas where ecological projects overlap and to predict the potential enhancement in carbon sinks under varying climate and human activity scenarios. The findings revealed that: (1) The carbon sinks clearly and steadily increased in regions where five ecological projects were implemented from 1982 to 2019. In contrast, the carbon sinks did not significantly increase in regions with two or three ecological projects. (2) As the number of ecological projects increased, the impact of human activities on the carbon sinks gradually decreased. In eastern China, rapid economic development and significant interference from human activities hindered the growth of carbon sinks. In contrast, in western China, the warming and humidification trend of the climate, large-scale afforestation, and other ecological projects have significantly improved carbon sinks. (3) The regions with five overlapping ecological projects exhibited the greatest enhancement and stability of carbon sinks under different scenarios. Compared with the SSP585 scenario, under the SSP126 scenario, the carbon sinks increased, and their stability was greater. Achieving carbon neutrality requires major ecological projects to account for the limitations imposed by climatic conditions. Instead of isolated projects or the implementation of single restoration measures, a comprehensive approach that uses the synergistic effects of combined ecological strategies is recommended.

Understanding vegetation stability is essential for evaluating ecosystem resilience and informing adaptive land management under changing climatic conditions. This study investigated the spatiotemporal patterns and climatic drivers of vegetation stability across Jiangsu Province, China. Vegetation productivity was assessed using the annual maximum kernel normalized difference vegetation index, while stability was quantified through two indicators: proportional variability (PV) and lag-one autocorrelation (AR). Results revealed that 15.77% of the province experienced increases in PV and AR, indicating growing vegetation instability, particularly in the south-central and southeastern regions. In contrast, 84.23% of the area showed declining PV and AR trends, suggesting enhanced stability, mainly in the southwestern, northern, and central regions. Spatially, high AR values were observed in western and southern Jiangsu, while high PV values were concentrated along the eastern coast and near Lake Taihu. More stable areas-characterized by low PV and AR-were primarily located in the central and northwestern regions. An interpretable machine learning model identified background solar radiation and its temporal variability as the dominant drivers of vegetation stability, followed by vapor pressure deficit (VPD). Precipitation variability had minimal influence. SHAP dependence plots revealed nonlinear responses: moderate radiation and higher soil moisture promoted stability, while elevated VPD and radiation variability reduced it. Most regions were in favorable ecological condition, although ~20% were classified as poor and another ~20% remained uncertain. These findings highlight the key roles of radiation and moisture in regulating vegetation stability and offer insights for climate-resilient land management in intensively cultivated landscapes.

Prior work has shown that gamer loyalty is important for the sales of a developer’s future games. Therefore, it is important for game developers to increase the longevity of their games. However, game developers cannot always meet the growing and changing needs of the gaming community, due to the often already overloaded schedules of developers. So-called modders can potentially assist game developers with addressing gamers’ needs. Modders are enthusiasts who provide modifications or completely new content for a game. By supporting modders, game developers can meet the rapidly growing and varying needs of their gamer base. Modders have the potential to play a role in extending the life expectancy of a game, thereby saving game developers time and money, and leading to a better overall gaming experience for their gamer base. In this paper, we empirically study the metadata of 9,521 mods that were extracted from the Nexus Mods distribution platform. The Nexus Mods distribution platform is one of the largest mod distribution platforms for PC games at the time of our study. The goal of our paper is to provide useful insights about mods on the Nexus Mods distribution platform from a quantitative perspective, and to provide researchers a solid foundation to further explore game mods. To better understand the potential of mods to extend the longevity of a game we study their characteristics, and we study their release schedules and post-release support (in terms of bug reports) as a proxy for the willingness of the modding community to contribute to a game. We find that providing official support for mods can be beneficial for the perceived quality of the mods of a game: games for which a modding tool is provided by the original game developer have a higher median endorsement ratio than mods for games that do not have such a tool. In addition, mod users are willing to submit bug reports for a mod. However, they often fail to do this in a systematic manner using the bug reporting tool of the Nexus Mods platform, resulting in low-quality bug reports which are difficult to resolve. Our findings give the first insights into the characteristics, release schedule and post-release support of game mods. Our findings show that some games have a very active modding community, which contributes to those games through mods. Based on our findings, we recommend that game developers who desire an active modding community for their own games provide the modding community with an officially-supported modding tool. In addition, we recommend that mod distribution platforms, such as Nexus Mods, improve their bug reporting system to receive higher quality bug reports.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for game developers to manage the cost of developing a game, while meeting the high expectations of gamers. One way to balance the increasing gamer expectation and development stress is to build an active modding community around the game. There exist several examples of games with an extremely active and successful modding community, with the Minecraft game being one of the most notable ones. This paper reports on an empirical study of 1,114 popular and 1,114 unpopular Minecraft mods from the CurseForge mod distribution platform, one of the largest distribution platforms for Minecraft mods. We analyzed the relationship between 33 features across 5 dimensions of mod characteristics and the popularity of mods (i.e., mod category, mod documentation, environmental context of the mod, remuneration for the mod, and community contribution for the mod), to understand the characteristics of popular Minecraft mods. We firstly verify that the studied dimensions have significant explanatory power in distinguishing the popularity of the studied mods. Then we evaluated the contribution of each of the 33 features across the 5 dimensions. We observed that popular mods tend to have a high quality description and promote community contribution.

Identifying the stability and sensitivity of land ecosystems to climate change is vital for exploring nature-based solutions. However, the underlying mechanisms governing ecosystem stability and sensitivity, especially in regions with overlapping ecological projects, remain unclear. based on Mann-Kendall, stability analysis method, and multiple regression method, this study quantified the stability and sensitivity of gross primary productivity (GPP) to climate variables [temperature, vapor pressure deficit (VPD), soil moisture, and radiation] in China from 1982 to 2019. Our findings revealed the following: (1) GPP demonstrated an increased trend with lower stability in Eastern regions, whereas a decreasing trend with higher stability was observed in Western and Southwest China. Notably, the stability of GPP was highest (74.58%) in areas with five overlapping ecological projects: Grain to Green, Natural Forest Resource Protection Project, Three-River Ecological Conservation and Restoration Project, Return Grazing to Grassland Project, and Three-North Shelter Forestation Project. (2) In regions with minimal or no overlapping ecological projects, temperature and radiation jointly dominated GPP variations. In contrast, water-related factors (VPD and soil moisture) significantly affected GPP in areas with multiple overlapping ecological projects. (3) In the southwestern and northeastern regions, GPP exhibited the highest sensitivity to climate change, whereas, in the eastern coastal areas and Tibet, GPP showed low sensitivity to climate change. In the Loess Plateau, where five ecological projects overlap extensively, carbon sinks primarily demonstrate a monotonic increasing trend, high stability, and low sensitivity to climate change. This study aimed to assess the stability of the land ecosystems and delineate their sensitivity to climate changes, thereby laying the groundwork for understanding ecosystem resilience.

Southwest China (SWC) holds the distinction of being the world’s largest rock desertification area. Nevertheless, the impacts of climate change and ecological restoration projects on the carbon sinks in the karst area of Southwest China have not been systematically evaluated. In this study, we calculated carbon sinks by utilizing the Carnegie–Ames–Stanford Approach (CASA) model, and the actual measurements, including the net primary productivity (NPP) data and soil respiration (Rs,) were calculated to obtain carbon sink data. Our findings suggest that the carbon sinks in the karst areas are displaying increasing trends or positive reversals, accounting for 58.47% of the area, which is larger than the overall average of 45.08% for Southwest China. This suggests that the karst areas have a greater carbon sequestration potential. However, approximately 10.42% of carbon sinks experience negative reversals. The regions with increasing and positive reversals are primarily located in the western parts of Guizhou and Guangxi, while negative reversals are observed in the eastern parts of Chongqing, Guangxi, and Guizhou. Ecological restoration projects are the main driving factors for the carbon sinks with increasing trends. Increased humidity and ecological restoration management are the main reasons for the positive reversals of carbon sinks. However, warming and drought shift the carbon sinks from increasing to decreasing in Chongqing, east of Guangxi and Guizhou. The findings of this study highlight the significant role of ecological restoration projects and reexamine the impact of climate change on carbon sequestration.

T cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T‐ALL) is a highly aggressive haematological cancer of the bone marrow. The abnormal expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) is reportedly involved in T‐ALL development and progression. Thus, we aimed to decipher the involvement of miR‐204 silencing mediated by DNA methylation in the occurrence of T cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T‐ALL). miR‐204 expression was determined in bone marrow and peripheral blood samples from T‐ALL patients by real‐time quantitative PCR (RT‐qPCR) with its effect on cell proliferation evaluated by functional assays. In addition, bisulphite sequencing PCR was employed to detect the DNA methylation level of the miR‐204 promoter region, and the binding site between miR‐204 and IRAK1 was detected by luciferase assay. We found that miR‐204 was down‐regulated in T cells of T‐ALL patients, which was caused by the increased DNA methylation in the promoter region of miR‐204. Moreover, overexpression of miR‐204 inhibited T‐ALL cell proliferation while enhancing their apoptosis through interleukin receptor‐associated kinase 1 (IRAK1), which enhanced the expression of matrix metalloproteinase‐2 (MMP‐2) and MMP‐9 through activation of p‐p65. Thus, miR‐204 modulated MMP‐2 and MMP‐9 through IRAK1/NF‐κB signalling pathway, which was confirmed by in vivo assay. Taken together, DNA methylation‐mediated miR‐204 silencing increased the transcription of IRAK1, thus activating the NF‐κB signalling pathway and up‐regulating the downstream targets MMP‐2/MMP‐9.

The Ecological Conservation Redline (ECR) of China plays an important role in avoiding ecological space occupancy and maintaining regional ecological security. Anji County in Zhejiang Province is one of the first regions to implement the ECR in China. This paper takes Anji County as an example to analyze the effects of ECR. To do this, we first set up two scenarios with the CLUE-S model: a normal land-use development scenario (NLDS) and an ECR implementation scenario (ECRS); then we compare the land use of 2010 and 2015 under NLDS and ECRS. Land use, ecosystem services value (ESV), landscape metrics, and ecological product outputs were compared between the entire county and the ECR areas. The results revealed the following: (1) From 2000 to 2015, the ecological land in Anji County decreased by 4.03%, while it decreased by 1.17% in the ECR areas. (2) In the ECR areas, there was less arable land and construction land of the ECRS than in the NLDS, which indicates the ECR impeded the expansion of construction land and arable land in the ECR areas. (3) The ECR areas account for 39% of Anji County but contribute more than 80% to the ESV of the whole county. During 2000–2015, the ESV of the entire county decreased while the ESV of the ECR areas increased. (4) From 2000 to 2015, whereas landscape fragmentation of the entire county increased, that of ECR areas decreased. (5) Since the ECR’s implementation, Anji County has vigorously developed the bamboo industry, ecological agriculture, the tourism industry, and achieved rapid economic development via industrial restructuring and transformation. On the whole, the ECR has neither adversely affected land development nor economic development but instead has promoted the optimization of the land’s spatial development pattern.

With the rapid growing market and competition in the gaming industry, it is challenging to develop a successful game, making the quality of games very important. To improve the quality of games, developers commonly use gamer-submitted bug reports to locate bugs in games. Recently, gameplay videos have become popular in the gaming community. A few of these videos showcase a bug, offering developers a new opportunity to collect context-rich bug information. In this paper, we investigate whether videos that showcase a bug can automatically be identified from the metadata of gameplay videos that are readily available online. Such bug videos could then be used as a supplemental source of bug information for game developers. We studied the number of gameplay videos on the Steam platform, one of the most popular digital game distribution platforms, and the difficulty of identifying bug videos from these gameplay videos. We show that naïve approaches such as using keywords to search for bug videos are time-consuming and imprecise. We propose an approach which uses a random forest classifier to rank gameplay videos based on their likelihood of being a bug video. Our proposed approach achieves a precision that is 43% higher than that of the naïve keyword searching approach on a manually labelled dataset of 96 videos. In addition, by evaluating 1,400 videos that are identified by our approach as bug videos, we calculated that our approach has both a mean average precision at 10 and a mean average precision at 100 of 0.91. Our study demonstrates that it is feasible to automatically identify gameplay videos that showcase a bug.