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The rapidly growing car industry in China has led to an equally rapid expansion of monoculture rubber in many regions of South East Asia. Xishuangbanna, the second largest rubber planting area in China, located in the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, supplies about 37% of the domestic natural rubber production. There, high income possibilities from rubber drive a dramatic expansion of monoculture plantations which poses a threat to natural forests. For the first time we mapped rubber plantations in and outside protected areas and their net present value for the years 1988, 2002 (Landsat, 30 m resolution) and 2010 (RapidEye, 5 m resolution). The purpose of our study was to better understand the pattern and dynamics of the expansion of rubber plantations in Xishuangbanna, as well as its economic prospects and conservation impacts. We found that 1) the area of rubber plantations was 4.5% of the total area of Xishuangbanna in 1988, 9.9% in 2002, and 22.2% in 2010; 2) rubber monoculture expanded to higher elevations and onto steeper slopes between 1988 and 2010; 3) the proportion of rubber plantations with medium economic potential dropped from 57% between 1988 and 2002 to 47% in 2010, while the proportion of plantations with lower economic potential had increased from 30% to 40%; and 4) nearly 10% of the total area of nature reserves within Xishuangbanna has been converted to rubber monoculture by 2010. On the basis of our findings, we conclude that the rapid expansion of rubber plantations into higher elevations, steeper terrain, and into nature reserves (where most of the remaining forests of Xishuangbanna are located) poses a serious threat to biodiversity and environmental services while not producing the expected economic returns. Therefore, it is essential that local governments develop long-term land use strategies for balancing economic benefits with environmental sustainability, as well as for assisting farmers with the selection of land suitable for rubber production.

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China is investing immense resources for planting trees, totalling more than US$ 100 billion in the past decade alone. Every year, China reports more afforestation than the rest of the world combined. Here, we show that China's forest cover gains are highly definition-dependent. If the definition of ‘forest’ follows FAO criteria (including immature and temporarily unstocked areas), China has gained 434 000 km2 between 2000 and 2010. However, remotely detectable gains of vegetation that non-specialists would view as forest (tree cover higher than 5 m and minimum 50% crown cover) are an order of magnitude less (33 000 km2). Using high-resolution maps and environmental modelling, we estimate that approximately 50% of the world's forest with minimum 50% crown cover has been lost in the past approximately 10 000 years. China historically lost 1.9–2.7 million km2 (59–67%), and substantial losses continue. At the same time, most of China's afforestation investment targets environments that our model classes as unsuitable for trees. Here, gains detectable via satellite imagery are limited. Conversely, the regions where modest gains are detected are environmentally suitable but have received little afforestation investment due to conflicting land-use demands for agriculture and urbanization. This highlights the need for refined forest monitoring, and greater consideration of environmental suitability in afforestation programmes.

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The objective of this study was to explore the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 epidemic on ongoing and upcoming drug clinical trials. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with clinical trial staff and clinical trial subjects were surveyed by questionnaire in this study. The results of interviews and questionnaire showed that coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has led to many changes in the implementation of drug clinical trials, including: a variety of meetings being held online webinars using various platforms, telemedicine and follow-up by video, A large number of deviations from protocol and losses of follow-up, delivery of clinical trial drugs by express, additional workload caused by screening for coronavirus, and anxiety of subjects. These results suggest that the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak has hindered the progress and damaged the quality of clinical trials. The online meeting, remote follow-up, express delivery of drugs and remote monitoring in the epidemic environment can ensure the progress of clinical trials to a certain extent, but they cannot fully guarantee the quality as before.

The current unprecedented expansion of infrastructure promises to enhance human wellbeing but risks causing substantial harm to natural ecosystems and the benefits they provide for people. A framework for systematically and proactively identifying the likely benefits and costs of such developments is badly needed. Here, we develop and test at the subregional scale a recently proposed global scheme for comparing the potential gains from new roads for food production with their likely impact on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Working in the Greater Mekong—an exceptionally biodiverse subregion undergoing rapid development—we combined maps of isolation from urban centres, yield gaps, and the current area under 17 crops to estimate where and how far road development could in principle help to increase food production without the need for cropland expansion. We overlaid this information with maps summarising the importance of remaining habitats to terrestrial vertebrates and (as examples of major ecosystem services) to global and local climate regulation. This intersection revealed several largely converted yet relatively low-yielding areas (such as central, eastern, and northeastern Thailand and the Ayeyarwady Delta), where narrowing yield gaps by improving transport links has the potential to substantially increase food production at relatively limited environmental cost. Concentrating new roads and road improvements here while taking strong measures to prevent their spread into areas which are still extensively forested (such as northern Laos, western Yunnan, and southwestern Cambodia) could thus enhance rural livelihoods and regional food production while helping safeguard vital ecosystem services and globally significant biological diversity.

Protected areas (PAs) are supposedly key refuges for the world's remaining biodiversity. Our study site, Xishuangbanna, harbors a high proportion of China's biodiversity but is threatened by rapid deforestation and expansion of monoculture rubber. We quantified the success of Xishuangbanna's PAs in preventing deforestation. Most previous analyses of PA effectiveness have insufficiently accounted for biases arising from PA location and establishment, because they overlooked the importance of site‐matching in accounting for landscape change. We used matching methods to minimize such biases in comparing land use conversion rates inside and outside‐PAs. By 2010, Xishuangbanna had 3,455.5 km2 (~18%) designated as PAs. However, rubber occupied 22% of its land area and was expanding at a rate of 153.4 km2/year. Between 1988 and 2010, conventional analysis showed a deforestation rate of 9.3 km2/year. However, matching analysis showed a significantly higher rate of deforestation, 10.7 km2/year, which resulted in the deforestation of ~11% of PA's land. We argue that PAs were less effective than had previously been thought. The situation worsened from 2002 to 2010, when the deforestation rate within PAs was actually higher than that of outside PAs, although this difference was not significant. The designated higher levels of protection in ‘core’ zones were also unsuccessful in preventing deforestation. At current rates, within the next 50 years, a further 16% of PAs would be deforested in Xishuangbanna. This could even be an underestimate, as without intervention, drivers of deforestation tend to accelerate. Therefore, reviewing and strengthening current PA management policies is essential.