Search

With the rapid socio-economic development in China, poverty alleviation and the reduction of the environmental footprint in the plastic film mulching (PM) planting system have become key to sustainable agricultural production. Although many studies have evaluated the maize yield, agricultural economic benefits, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with PM through small-scale field experiments, identifying suitable PM regions in combination with their demographic characteristics and the future development of such systems has received little attention. This study combines a Denitrification-Decomposition (DNDC) model and demographic characteristics to determine the optimum PM region in rainfed areas of the Loess Plateau in northwest China. The results demonstrated that PM produced a higher maize yield, agricultural net profit (ANP), and cost-benefit ratio compared to a control treatment (CK) without PM. An agricultural income far above the poverty level would assist in meeting the goals of alleviating poverty and building a prosperous society. In addition, the PM system produced more GHG emissions, but had a lower greenhouse gas intensity (GHGI) than CK under both low (200 kg N ha−1) and high (300 kg N ha−1) nitrogen (N) fertilizer rates. This study developed a framework to evaluate maize yield alongside economic and environmental indicators. We concluded that PM should be adopted in areas with precipitation less than 500 mm, and concentrated in the region with rainfall of 200–400 mm. The results provide a theoretical basis for the sustainable development of the PM maize planting system, and will contribute to the desired goal of environmentally sustainable agricultural production.

High order phenomena in the visible range and with polarization dependence in the ultraviolet (UV) region of the microphotoluminescence (micro-PL) spectrum in whispering-gallery mode (WGM) ZnO microrod cavity have been thoroughly studied at room temperature. WGM ZnO microrod cavity with good crystallinity is produced by the CVD growth method, and the ZnO microrod structures are characterized by structural and optical methods. Through the micro-PL spectrum measurement of the ZnO microrod, it is found that high-order resonance peaks appeared in the visible region. The different polarization conditions can be adjusted by rotating the angles of the polarizer, and it is proved that the micro-PL spectrum has strong polarization-dependent behavior in the UV region. Our results imply broad application potentials in the study of ZnO microrod-based photonic cavity devices.

Key distribution patterns (KDPs) are finite incidence structures satisfying a certain property which makes them widely used in minimizing the key storage and ensuring the security of communication between users in a large network. We construct a new KDP using t-design and combine two ω-KDPs to give new (ω-1)-KDPs, which provide secure communication in a large network and minimize the amount of key storage.

Recent image compositing methods mainly focus on the compositing for normal images, while for shadow ones, these methods may be less effective due to the special structure in the shadow area. Besides, many of these methods may generate problems of serious color distortion or cannot realize seamless blending. In order to improve these problems, we propose a new hierarchical weighted method based on an alpha matte for image composition, especially for those with shadows. In our method, we divide the blending area into different layers according to the alpha matte, and implement a hybrid method combining gradient based method with transformed alpha blending as well as weights in these layers respectively. By conducting a series of experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.