Environmental managers and policy makers are increasingly discussing trade‐offs between ecosystem services, but few studies have analyzed these trade‐offs with a view to informing land‐use planning. Using specialized models, we quantify ecosystem services in several land‐use scenarios relative to actual land‐use change over a 9‐year period. These scenarios were developed in an effort to maintain agricultural production while improving water quality and increasing water quantity in the watershed of the Miyun Reservoir, the only source of surface water currently available for domestic use in Beijing, China. Within the watershed, from 2000 to 2009, forest cover and urban area increased by 33% and 280%, while water provision and water purification services declined by 9% and 27%, respectively. Under a hybrid scenario of agricultural expansion with riparian grassland buffers, three services – water provision, water purification, and sediment retention – as well as agricultural production all improved as compared with 2009 levels. Riparian grassland protection zones, seldom used in China, can effectively resolve trade‐offs among multiple ecosystem services and are now being considered and implemented in several locations.

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Abstract:Household livelihood strategies are embedded in the natural and socioeconomic contexts in which people live. Analyzing the factors that influence household livelihood choice and defining their consequences can be beneficial for informing rural household policies. In turn, this has great significance for fostering sustainable livelihood strategies. We grouped household livelihood strategies based on the income distribution of 756 households and analyzed their influencing factors and possible livelihood consequences in the watershed of Miyun Reservoir, the only source of surface water currently available for domestic use in Beijing, China. Local farmers' livelihood strategies can be grouped into three types: farming, local off-farm, and labor-migrant. Farming households have the lowest livelihood capitals, other than natural capital, compared with labor-migrant households and off-farm households, the latter having better livelihood capital status. Geographical location, natural capital, household structure, labor quality, and ecological policies are the main factors affecting farmers' choice of livelihood strategy. Local off-farm households have a significantly lower dependency on firewood, land resources, and investment than that of farming and labor-migrant households, and have the highest reliance on fossil fuel. This household classification can help us understand the livelihood characteristics, impact factors, and consequences of different types of household strategies, which also suggest tailored policy and management options to promote sustainable livelihoods based on different household types.

Increasingly, tourists are planning trips by themselves using the vast amount of information available on the Web. However, they still expect and want trip plan advisory services. In this paper, we study the tour planning problem in which our goal is to design a tour trip with the most desirable sites, subject to various budget and time constraints. We first establish a framework for this problem, and then formulate it as a mixed integer linear programming problem. However, except when the size of the problem is small, say, with less than 20-30 sites, it is computationally infeasible to solve the mixed-integer linear programming problem. Therefore, we propose a heuristic method based on local search ideas. The method is efficient and provides good approximation solutions. Numerical results are provided to validate the method. We also apply our method to the team orienteering problem, a special case of the tour planning problem which has been considered in the literature, and compare our method with other existing methods. Our numerical results show that our method produces very good approximation solutions with relatively small computational efforts comparing with other existing methods.

Paeoniflorin (PAE), a principal bioactive component of Paeonia lactiflora Pall., appears to have antitumor properties. However, the pharmacological activity of PAE in endometrial cancer and the specific mechanisms have remained largely elusive. The present study aimed to determine the antitumor activity of PAE in the human endometrial cancer cell line RL95-2 and explore the potential mechanisms. Cell proliferation was assessed to evaluate the antitumor effect of PAE towards RL95-2 cells via a Cell Counting Kit-8 assay. Protein expression was examined to investigate changes in the signaling pathways of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK), extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) and nuclear factor (NF)-κB in RL95-2 cells during PAE treatment by western blot analysis. The results revealed that PAE significantly and dose- and time-dependently inhibited the proliferation of RL95-2 cells. In addition, PAE activated MAPK signaling pathways (p38, JNK and ERK) and the NF-κB signaling pathway. Furthermore, p38 MAPK and NF-κB inhibitors (SB203580 and MG-132, respectively) prevented PAE-induced proliferative inhibition in RL95-2 cells. However, ERK and JNK inhibitors (PD98059 and BI-78D3, respectively) did not produce such an inhibition. In conclusion, the present study demonstrated that PAE exerts its anti-proliferative activity via activating p38 MAPK and NF-κB signaling pathways in endometrial cancer cells, providing a potential new drug of choice for endometrial cancer therapy.