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Understanding the interactions of climate-vegetation and human-vegetation has been a critical issue and increasingly attracting attention from scientific community in the field of global change research. This study investigated the heterogeneous impacts of climate change and anthropogenic activities on vegetation change by applying the trend analysis and Geodetector approach. The spatial and temporal patterns of MODIS NDVI and LAI during 2003–2017 were firstly examined in China. We then quantified the contribution and interactions effects of climatic factors (temperature and precipitation) and anthropogenic factors (population, gross domestic product and other four categories of forestry investment) on vegetation change in five typical areas of China. Both NDVI and LAI across China demonstrated a significant increasing trend over the past two decades. However, the eastern developmental regions such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region and Yangtze River Delta exhibited a decreasing trend due to fast urbanization. Socio-economical inputs (the explanatory power of forestry investment > 40%, the range of explanatory power is 0 to 100%) were identified as the dominant driving forces of vegetation change for the most of study areas. Precipitation was the most important natural influencing factor of vegetation change. We also found that the interactions between forestry investment and other factors presented much greater explanatory power on vegetation change than a single factor. Our research highlights that the afforestation program in China during the past several decades plays an important role in contributing to vegetation greening across the country. Greening and degradation, however, are largely related to landscape context, which could be due to natural change and anthropogenic impact. To maintain high levels of forests, conserving the vegetation is more important than increasing the economic development.

Landscape degradation and fragmentation has taken place across the coastal area of China over the past decades due to complex interactions between natural and anthropogenic processes, which results in various negative environmental and ecological consequences. Therefore, understanding of the spatio-temporal dynamics and underlying determinants for landscape change is increasingly recognized as essential for land use planning and policy decision making towards socio-economic sustainable development. In this study, we aimed to examine the changing trends of annual landscape patterns along the Chinese coastal zones from 1992 to 2018. By means of quantile regression and grid-by-grid random forest regression, we then quantified the heterogeneous effects of responsible climate change and human activities on landscape patterns at the grid level. The results indicated that coastal areas across China in the whole landscape level has rapidly tended towards more fragmentated, declining aggregational, complex and irregular edge shaped landscape over the past 30 years. However, opposite evolution directions of landscape patterns were observed between urban fringe (less fragmentation and more aggregation) and remote areas far away from urban center (more fragmentation and less aggregation). High changing rate of landscape metrics generally occurred in areas adjacent to the center of major urban agglomeration. Averagely, more than 40% of significant fragmented landscape mainly caused by the growth of built-up lands. The contribution rate of urbanization also varied with changes in spatial positions and different quantiles. This study employed spatially explicit methodologies to explore the dynamic of coastal landscape and associated drivers, which filled the knowledge gaps related to landscape sustainability and coastal environmental planning and management from the perspective of time and space.

In this paper, the physical properties of a soluble non-starch polysaccharide (EGSP) from the endosperm of Gleditsia japonica var. delavayi seeds, and its effects on starch digestibility, glucose diffusion and glycemic index (GI) were investigated. EGSP has good acid-base and thermal stability and can form high viscosity solutions at low concentrations. Its real density (RD), solubility and lowest-gelled-concentration (LGC) are 1.33 ± 0.03 g/mL, 1.24 ± 0.15 g/100 mL and 20 g/L. Besides, EGSP also had certain oil and glucose adsorption properties. In vitro experiments showed that EGSP could effectively reduce the starch digestibility and glucose diffusion rate, which might be due to its high viscosity and the abilities of hindering starch gelation. Further in vivo experiments confirmed that EGSP can reduce the GI of starchy foods and inhibit the surge of postprandial blood glucose level.