Abstract. The transboundary Lancang–Mekong River basin has experienced dynamics of cooperation over the past several decades, which is a common emergent response in transboundary coupled human–water systems. Downstream countries rely on the Mekong River for fisheries, agriculture, navigation and ecological services, while upstream countries have been constructing dams to generate hydropower. The dam construction and operation in upstream countries have changed the seasonality of streamflow in downstream countries, affecting their economic benefits. More recently, cooperation between upstream and downstream countries has been enhanced throughout the river basin. In this study, we introduce a quantitative socio-hydrological model to simulate hydrological processes, reservoir operations, economic benefits, policy feedbacks and therefore dynamics of cooperation within the Lancang–Mekong River basin. The model reproduces the observed dynamics of cooperation in the basin revealed by sentiment analysis of news articles. Hydrological variability such as droughts and human activities associated with reservoir operations affect dynamics of cooperation between the riparian countries, with importance attached to indirect political benefits of upstream playing an important role in the enhancement of cooperation. In this way, our study generated understanding of emergent cooperation dynamics in this transboundary river basin, and the socio-hydrological model used here provides a useful new framework to investigate and improve transboundary water management elsewhere.

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Abstract. Riparian countries have their respective values and priorities for water management, and their values of shared water have fundamental impacts for their propensity to be involved in cooperative management and adhere to treaties/agreements. However, there is limited understanding of the changing values and interests of each riparian country. Taking the Lancang–Mekong River basin as a case study, this paper aims to analyse the evolution of water conflict and cooperation dynamics from the perspectives of multiple countries. Newspaper articles were used as the key data source as they provide insights into events reported on by the media that are representative of each country/sector they are published within. The results depict a trend of cooperative sentiments towards water events occurring within the region. The six riparian countries (China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam) had a greater average sentiment score (0.5) for cooperation than international countries (0.16) for the majority of the study period. The trend also shows that countries further downstream showed lower cooperative sentiments, except for Vietnam (China 0.86, Myanmar 0.58, Laos 0.46, Thailand 0.34, Cambodia 0.13, Vietnam 0.91). Dam infrastructure was often negatively reported (60 % of negatively reported articles), which is therefore a major contributor to conflict for the Lancang–Mekong River basin. Events that are positively reported are those that aid in connecting leaders and project developers between riparian countries including meetings, bilateral and multilateral cooperation, and development projects. These findings provide the basis for further revealing the mechanism of cooperation and conflicts as well as more proactively managing cooperation and conflict in the Lancang–Mekong River basin and beyond.

The small Sanjiang plain is one of the most important commodity grain production bases and the largest fresh water wetland in China. Due to the rapid expansion of agricultural activities in the past 30 years, the contradiction between economic development and the loss of ecosystem services has become an issue of increasing concern in the area. In this study, we analysed land use changes and the loss of ecosystem services value caused by these changes. We found that cropland sprawl was predominant and occurred in forest, wetland, and grassland areas in the small Sanjiang plain from 1980 to 2010. Using a model to evaluate ecosystem services value, we calculated that the decreased values of ecosystem services were 169.88 × 108 Yuan from 1980 to 2000 and 120.00 × 108 Yuan from 2000 to 2010. All of the ecosystem services were diminished from 1980 to 2010 except for food production. Therefore, the loss of ecosystem services value should be considered by the policymakers of land use and development.

Daily meteorological data of 12 years from 838 stations over China were collected and applied to calibrate the HS model by comparison between the values of ET0 calculated from the original HS and those from the PM model. The calibrated HS model was evaluated by the distribution and values of statistical indices. After calibration, the mean values of the mean absolute error (MAE) and the root mean square error (RMSE) decreased by 24.6 and 23.9%, respectively. The correlation coefficients (R) for most areas were greater than 0.9, and the minimum R increased by 2% compared with the values of the original. The minimum and maximum slope of the zero‐intercept regression lines changed from 0.839 to 0.898 and from 1.46 to 1.04 during the validation period, respectively. The distribution of the statistical indices also showed better performance in most areas. The calibrated HS model produced the greatest ET0 estimation in the subtropical monsoon climate zone and the south‐western part of the temperate monsoon climate zone. Although the performance of the HS model improved after calibration in the plateau and mountain climate and temperate monsoon climate zones, the original HS model had high enough accuracy. However, for the tropical climate regions, the HS model failed to give reliable results even in calibrated form. Overall, the study illustrated that the calibrated HS model has higher accuracy for most climate zones. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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BackgroundAll modern rosids originated from a common hexapolyploid ancestor, and the genomes of some rosids have undergone one or more cycles of paleopolyploidy. After the duplication of the ancient genome, wholesale gene loss and gene subfunctionalization has occurred. Using the extensin super-gene family as an example, we tracked the differential retention and expansion of ancestral extensin genes in four modern rosids, Arabidopsis, Populus, Vitis and Carica, using several analytical methods.ResultsThe majority of extensin genes in each of the modern rosids were found to originate from different ancestral genes. In Arabidopsis and Populus, almost half of the extensins were paralogous duplicates within the genome of each species. By contrast, no paralogous extensins were detected in Vitis and Carica, which have only undergone the common γ-triplication event. It was noteworthy that a group of extensins containing the IPR006706 domain had actively duplicated in Arabidopsis, giving rise to a neo-extensin around every 3 million years. However, such extensins were absent from, or rare in, the other three rosids. A detailed examination revealed that this group of extensins had proliferated significantly in the genomes of a number of species in the Brassicaceae. We propose that this group of extensins might play important roles in the biology and in the evolution of the Brassicaceae. Our analyses also revealed that nearly all of the paralogous and orthologous extensin-pairs have been under strong purifying selection, leading to the strong conservation of the function of extensins duplicated from the same ancestral gene.ConclusionsOur analyses show that extensins originating from a common ancestor have been differentially retained and expanded among four modern rosids. Our findings suggest that, if Arabidopsis is used as the model plant, we can only learn a limited amount about the functions of a particular gene family. These results also provide an example of how it is essential to learn the origination of a gene when analyzing its function across different plant species.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1471-2164-15-612) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Atractylodes is an East-Asiatic endemic genera that distributed in China, Japan and Russian Far Eastern. As an important resource of medicinal plant, atractylodes has long been used as herbal medicine. To example the significant features in its trueborn quality and geographical distribution, we explored the relationships between medicine quality and habitat suitability in two classifications–lower atractylodin content than the standard of Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2010) and the other has higher content. We found that the atractylodin content is negatively related to the habitat suitability for atractylodes with lower atractylodin, while the atractylodin content is positively related to the habitat suitability for those with higher atractylodin. By analyzing the distribution of atractylodeswith lower atractylodin content than the standard of Pharmacopeia, we discovered that the main ecological factors that could inhibit the accumulation of atractylodin were soil type (39.7%), soil clay content (26.7%), mean temperature in December (22.3%), Cation-exchange capacity (6%), etc. And these ecological factors promoted the accumulation of atractylodin for the atractylodes with higher atractylodin. By integrating the two classifications, we finally predicted the distribution of atractylodin content in China.Our results realized the query of atractylodes quality in arbitrary coordinates, and satisfied the actually cultivation demands of “Planting area based on atractylodin quality”.