Most General Circulation Models predict more infrequent but larger precipitation events in the eastern United States combined with a warmer climate. This could have a negative effect on maize production. To understand the sensitivity of maize production to future changes in precipitation, we analyzed growing season precipitation and average state maize yields in the eastern United States for the period 1963-2011. Growing season precipitation did not show a strong trend during this period. However, crop yields increased at 3.90% in the southern, 2.62% in the central, and 2.31% in the northern part of the eastern United States, which we attributed to technology and management. To separate technology and management effects from precipitation variability, we corrected maize yields for these yield trends. We then correlated maize yield corrected for advances in technology and management with total growing season precipitation and precipitation in the critical month of pollination, from the regional to state scale. Maize yield -precipitation relationships showed that moisture shortage rather than excess determined maize yield in the Eastern United States. The relationship between total growing season precipitation-maize yield was stronger in the southeastern than in the northeastern U.S., but the critical month precipitation-maize yield relationship was stronger in the northeastern than in the southeastern U.S. If climate model predictions are accurate and total growing season precipitation will OPEN ACCESS Sustainability 2015, 7 5997 not decrease in this region but variability will, it is likely that maize yields in the northeastern U.S. will be more significantly affected.

The purpose of this study was to establish a spatial multi-scale integrated assessment framework for critical areas of ecosystem service supply and demand, in order to provide theoretical support for regional ecological protection planning and refined management. Taking the typical hilly area of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in China as an example, based on the assessment matrix of land use and ecosystem services, we used the method of spatial heterogeneity assessment and self-organizing feature mapping (SOFM) to explore the identification and regionalization of critical areas of ecosystem services at regional and small scales. The results show that there was spatial heterogeneity and scale effects of ecosystem services under the two scales. The small-scale supply–demand pattern was greatly affected by microtopography and land use patterns, and the importance of ecosystem services was as follows: forest area in the upper part of the mountain > orchard and dry area in the middle and lower part of the mountain > valley farming area > flat town and farming area. The regional-scale supply–demand pattern was greatly affected by landscape structure, location conditions and social economy, and the importance of ecosystem services was as follows: south > west > north > central. The SOFM network quantitatively identified four types of ecological areas with clear dominant functions at regional and small scales. The balance between supply and demand in the studied ecosystem service areas was I < II < III < IV, in which IV was the critical area in terms of supply and I was the critical area in terms of demand. This assessment framework can improve the spatial accuracy and objectivity of the quantification and mapping of ecosystem services, and provide new ideas for multi-scale identification and expression of ecosystem services.

Abstract-The paper presents a method (Improved Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process) to evaluate the development of rural informatization over the past decade in China. This article developed a rural informatization evaluation system including Rural informatization infrastructure, Rural informatization technology applications, Rural informatization technology professionals and Rural informatization external environment, four criterion layers and 15 specific indicators. The results show that the overall level of China's rural informatization was gradually increasing but regional development was imbalance, eastern region has the highest level, western region has the lowest level , northeastern is slightly higher than central region. By cluster analysis, found that provinces along the southeast coast and in North China have a better development, in southwest and northwest China have a poor development. At the typical case indicating that in rural informatization development is relatively backward areas, there are also individual cities have a better development.

Featured by diverse formats, sources, platforms and mathematical bases, the land resources data belong to a typical heterogeneous data warehouse. It is very important to establish the organizational model for land and resources management and supervision of resources. After thoroughly analyzing the characteristics of land resources data, this paper puts forward the establishment of "One Map" organizational model for land resources data used in supervision and service in four principles, that is, "comprehensiveness, integrity, sharing, timeliness" to analyze the characteristics of update and sharing relationship between the "One Map" database with Business Database, Monitoring Database and Index Database. Taking Chengdu city as an example, the ETL and data update management technology are employed to construct the initial "One Map" database and realize its update management. In this way, "One Map" comprehensive database is constructed with the full coverage of space, business and sector, which have covered more than two kinds and 51 items of land and resources data. In addition, these have covered 160 key elements, more than 90 million records and up to 3TB data so as to provide the data support and information service for analysis of land and resources management and supervision of resources.

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