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Ecological stoichiometry is a powerful indicator for understanding the adaptation of plants to environment. However, understanding of stoichiometric characteristics of leaf carbon (C%), nitrogen (N%), and phosphorus (P%) for aquatic macrophytes remains limited. In this study, 707 samples from 146 sites were collected to study the variations in leaf C%, N%, and P%, and tried to explore how different environmental conditions affect leaf C, N, and P stoichiometry. Results showed that the mean values of leaf C%, N%, P%, and N:P ratios were 39.95%, 2.12%, 0.14%, and 16.60% of macrophytes across the arid zone of northwestern China, respectively. And the mean values of leaf P% were lower than those from the Tibetan Plateau and eastern China, which maybe due to an adaptation strategy of the plants to the unique conditions in the arid zone in the long-term evolutionary process. The higher N:P ratios suggested that P was established as the limiting factor of the macrophytes communities in the arid zone of northwestern China. There were significant differences in leaf C%, N%, P%, and their ratios among different life forms. Our results also showed strong relationships between leaf N% and N:P ratios and longitude, leaf N%, P%, and N:P ratios and latitude, and leaf N% and P% and altitude, respectively. In addition, the results showed that pH can significantly influence leaf C%. Our results supported the temperature-plant physiology hypothesis owing to a negative relationship between leaf N% and P% of macrophytes and mean annual temperature in the arid zone of northwestern China. The different patterns of leaf stoichiometry between the arid zone of northwestern China and eastern China indicated that there were different physiological and ecological adaptability of macrophytes to environmental gradients in different climatic zones.

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The analysis of stable isotope composition is an important tool in research on plant physiological ecology. However, large-scale patterns of leaf stable isotopes for aquatic macrophytes have received considerably less attention. In this study, we examined the spatial pattern of the leaf δ13C and δ15N of macrophytes collected across the arid zone of northwestern China and tried to illustrate how they were affected by different environmental factors. Our results showed that the mean values of leaf δ13C and

Osmanthus fragrans is the ornamental and practical excellent garden tree featured with greening, beautification, and fragrance in one, and has been domesticated in China for 2500 years. Besides, an increasing number of papers on O. fragrans have been published so far, but these contributions have not been analyzed comprehensively. Considering that, in this research, a bibliometric methodology is adopted on documents related to O. fragrans obtained from the WoS database. The study demonstrated the main countries and institutions in terms of this field. Among them, the Chinese research on O. fragrans is in a leading position in the world. Regarding the specialization, the institution ranking is led by the Nanjing Forestry University, Henan University, and Zhejiang University. Apart from that, analysis on the keywords also highlighted the lines of research associated with plant functionality (e.g., antioxidant, antifungal activity, and anti-inflammatory activities), natural products (e.g., carotenoids, aroma, flavonoids, essential oils, phenylethanoid glycosides, and salidroside), and molecular biology (e.g., genetic diversity, transcription factors, and phylogeny). The results from this study also revealed that there is a lack of research on the production mechanism of floral fragrance and the flower color regulation mechanism in O. fragrans. Moreover, the aroma and flower color are gradually developing into the main areas of research on O. fragrans. It is also expected that future research in this field will focus on biochemistry and biomolecules.

The corticalis group is one of most diverse species-group in genus Clubiona Latreille, 1804. Currently, a total of 81 corticalis group species are known worldwide, amongst them 67 were recorded from China. However, the diversity of this group in China is still insufficiently known. Clubiona xianningsp. nov. is described as a new species of the C. corticalis species-group collected from Hubei Province, China.