Nature reserves (NR) are the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation. Over the past 60 years, the rapid expansion of NRs in China, one of the world's megadiverse countries, has played a critical role in slowing biodiversity loss. We examined the changes in the number and area of China's NRs from 1956 to 2014 and analyzed the effect of economic development on the expansion of China's NRs from 2005 to 2014 with linear models. Despite a continuing increase in the number of NRs, the total area of China's NRs decreased by 3% from 2007 to 2014. This loss resulted from downsizing and degazettement of existing NRs and a slowdown in the establishment of new ones. Nature reserves in regions with rapid economic development exhibited a greater decrease in area, suggesting that downsizing and degazettement of NRs are closely related to the intensifying competition between economic growth and conservation. For example, boundary adjustments to national NRs, the most strictly protected NRs, along the coast of China's Yellow Sea, a global biodiversity hotspot with a fast‐growing economy, resulted in the loss of one‐third of the total area. One of the most important ecosystems in these NRs, tidal wetlands, decreased by 27.8% because of boundary adjustments and by 25.2% because of land reclamation. Our results suggest conservation achievement, in terms of both area and quality, are declining at least in some regions in the Chinese NR estate. Although the designation of protected areas that are primarily managed for sustainable use has increased rapidly in recent years in China, we propose that NRs with biodiversity conservation as their main function should not be replaced or weakened.

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Salinity is the primary restriction factor for vegetation conservation and the rehabilitation of coastal areas in Eastern China. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) have been proved to have the ability to alleviate salt stress in plants. However, the role of AMF in relieving salt stress among indigenous trees species is less well known, limiting the application of AMF in the afforestation of local area. In this study, a salt-stress pot experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of AMF on Zelkova serrata (Thunb.) Makino, a tree species with significant potential for afforestation of coastal area. The Z. serrata seedlings inoculated with three AMF strains (Funneliformis mosseae 1, Funneliformis mosseae 2, and Diversispora tortuosa) were subjected to two salt treatments (0 and 100 mM NaCl) under greenhouse conditions. The results showed that the three AMF strains had positive effects, to a certain extent, on plant growth and photosynthesis under normal condition. However, only F. mosseae 1 and F. mosseae 2 alleviated the inhibition of growth, photosynthesis, and nutrient uptake of Z. serrata seedlings under salt stress. The two AMF strains mitigated salt-induced adverse effects on seedlings mainly by increasing the leaf photosynthetic ability and biomass accumulation by reducing Na+ content, increasing P, K+, and Mg2+ content, as well as by enhancing photosynthetic pigments content and the stomatal conductance of leaves. These results indicated that AMF inoculation is a promising strategy for the afforestation of coastal areas in Eastern China.

and Telecommunications, ChinaCode embedding, as an emerging paradigm for source code analysis, has attracted much attention over the past few years. It aims to represent code semantics through distributed vector representations, which can be used to support a variety of program analysis tasks (e.g., code summarization and semantic labeling). However, existing code embedding approaches are intraprocedural, alias-unaware and ignoring the asymmetric transitivity of directed graphs abstracted from source code, thus they are still ineffective in preserving the structural information of code.This paper presents Flow2Vec, a new code embedding approach that precisely preserves interprocedural program dependence (a.k.a value-flows). By approximating the high-order proximity, i.e., the asymmetric transitivity of value-flows, Flow2Vec embeds control-flows and alias-aware data-flows of a program in a low-dimensional vector space. Our value-flow embedding is formulated as matrix multiplication to preserve context-sensitive transitivity through CFL reachability by filtering out infeasible value-flow paths.We have evaluated Flow2Vec using 32 popular open-source projects. Results from our experiments show that Flow2Vec successfully boosts the performance of two recent code embedding approaches code2vec and code2seq for two client applications, i.e., code classification and code summarization. For code classification, Flow2Vec improves code2vec with an average increase of 21.2%, 20.1% and 20.7% in precision, recall and F1, respectively. For code summarization, Flow2Vec outperforms code2seq by an average of 13.2%, 18.8% and 16.0% in precision, recall and F1, respectively. CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Automated static analysis; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning.