It has long been an aspirational goal to create artificial evaporators that allow omnidirectional energy absorptance, adequate water supply, and fast vapor transportation, replicating the feat of plant transpiration, to solve the global water crisis. This work reveals that magnolia fruits, as a kind of tree‐like living organism, can be outstanding 3D tree‐like evaporators through a simple carbonization process. The arterial pumping, branched diffusion, and confined evaporation are achieved by the “trunk,” “branches,” and “leaves,” respectively, of the mini tree. The mini tree possesses omnidirectional high light absorptance with minimized heat loss and gains energy from the environment. Water confined in the fruit possesses reduced vaporization enthalpy and transports quickly following the Murray's law. A record‐high vapor generation rate of 1.22 kg m−2 h−1 in dark and 3.15 kg m−2 h−1 under 1 sun illumination is achieved under the assistance of the gully‐like furry surface. The “absorption of nutrients” enables the fruit to recover valuable heavy metals as well as to produce clean water from wastewater efficiently. These findings not only reveal the hidden talent of magnolia fruits as cheap materials for vapor generation but also inspire future development of high‐performance, full‐time, and all‐weather vapor generation and water treatment devices.
In the practice of watershed ecological compensation, due to the inconsistency between the interests of economic development and the objectives of ecological protection, there are typical game characteristics among the relevant stakeholders. Taking the ecological compensation between Henan and Shaanxi in the Yellow River Basin as an example, this paper constructs an evolutionary game model, obtains the external conditions for various stakeholders to achieve stable cooperation from the perspective of the government, and demonstrates the necessity of combining vertical and horizontal ecological compensation. The sensitivity of each party’s decision making to key elements is analyzed through a simulation. The results show that: (1) the optimal strategy is mainly affected by the initial willingness of the upstream government and the central government; the strong regulatory power of the central government can eliminate the influence of the initial will; (2) development opportunity costs and vertical fiscal transfer payments have the most obvious influence on upstream government decision-making; (3) the effect on optimal decision state of downstream paying upstream ecological compensation is higher than that of upstream paying downstream ecological compensation; (4) the punishment of the central government should ensure the binding force on the lower governments, and the revenue and expenditure under its supervision strategy should ensure the effectiveness of the supervision public power. The above conclusions provide support for improving the ecological compensation mechanism of transboundary basins.
Solar desalination is expected to solve the problem of global water shortage. Yet its stability is plagued by salt accumulation. Here, a paper-based thermal radiation-enabled evaporation system (TREES) is demonstrated to achieve sustainable and highly efficient salt-collecting desalination, featuring a dynamic evaporation front based on the accumulated salt layer where water serves as its own absorber via energy down-conversion. When processing 7 wt % brine, it continuously evaporates water at a high rate2.25 L m–2 h–1 under 1 sun illuminationwhich is well beyond the input solar energy limit for over 366 h. It is revealed that such enhanced evaporation arises from the unique vertical evaporation wall of the paper-TREES, which captures the thermal energy from the heated bottom efficiently and gains extra energy from the warmer environment. These findings provide novel insights into the design of next-generation salt-harvesting solar evaporators and take a step further to advance their applications in green desalination.
Water resources provide indispensable ecosystem services, which are related to human well-being and sustainable social development. Accurately measuring the water ecosystem services value (WESV), and then grasping its changing characteristics, is particularly important for solving water problems. In this study, the typical area of the central Loess Plateau location is taken as the research area. Based on remote sensing images and statistical data, the direct market method combined with the equivalent factor method was used to calculate the WESV including groundwater and surface water, which is of greatest originality. The temporal and spatial variation characteristics in 2010, 2015 and 2020 were analyzed. Then, four WESV driving factors including per capita GDP, population density, proportion of water areas, and water consumption were selected, and the geographically weighted regression (GWR) model was used to analyze the spatial distribution pattern and temporal variation of WESV’s response to the influencing factors. The results showed that WESV experienced a process of first decreasing and then increasing, which was mainly caused by Yulin. For the composition of WESV, the proportion of provisioning services value has increased, which caused the proportion of regulating services value to decrease. The correlations between four factors and WESV were different. The distribution pattern of the influences was spatially heterogeneous, which showed regular variations over time. These results indicate the necessity of WESV’s independent research and provide a realistic basis for ecological compensation in the Yellow River Basin.
The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region of China experiences overexploitation of groundwater (GW), mainly through agricultural water use. Planting structure adjustment (PSA) has proved to be effective in controlling GW use, although this inevitably affects the stakeholders. An ecological protection compensation (EPC) policy has been implemented simultaneously with PSA to meet the compensation needs of those who have lost profits. However, problems in policy design and implementation resulted in insufficient sustainability of the EPC. This study aimed to resolve these problems fundamentally by improving the current policy, based on the analysis of the interactions among the central government, the local government, and the farmers. Firstly, a mechanism for implemented economic penalties for violations was introduced. Secondly, the long-term interests and respective characteristics of all parties were taken into consideration. Finally, a tripartite evolutionary game model was established. Analysis based on evolutionary game theory allowed calculation of the constraints of the parameters in the model, which can drive the model to evolve in the expected direction. Under these constraints, the numerical simulations showed that: 1) information asymmetry should be minimized as much as possible during policy implementation; 2) reducing costs can accelerate self-convergence, but will not affect other participants; 3) the implementation of economic penalties can promote the evolution of the supervised party to evolutionary stability strategy; 4) improving the level of effort by farmers in implementing the policy is key to accelerating the evolution of the entire system.
In article number 1900040, Kun Tang, Xiang Xiong, Shulin Gu, and co‐workers utilize carbonized magnolia fruits as energy‐harvesting vapor generators. The hidden talent of the magnolia fruit lies in its tree‐like structure in both macro‐ and micro‐scales. This work could inspire more biomimetic evaporator designs in the aim to tackle freshwater scarcity in a green and sustainable way.
Using fuzzy mater-element method, the comprehensive utilization efficiency of rain-flood resources in Rushan River is assessed. The uncertainty of the comprehensive utilization efficiency is processed by the fuzzy principle. Then the representative indexes are selected, and the standard values of indexes are indicated. After normalization, the close degree and weight coefficient are calculated. On basis of that, the rating membership of the comprehensive utilization efficiency is for grade II, equal “good”. So the paper concludes that the utilization of rain-flood resources in Rushan River Basin is feasible and effective. It provides follow-up support for the research of the utilization of rain-flood resources.
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