ALBERT

Description: Forecasting crop chemical characteristics based on soil properties is not only a possible way to spare supplementary sampling and testing, but also a potential method of instructing cultivation planning based on regional soil surveys. In this paper, taking the data of regional agricultural geological survey on Helianthus annuus sources in the western part of the Jilin province as an attempt, radial basis function neural networks were used to forecast the quality indexes of Helianthus annuus seeds based on the non-linear relationship between soil and crop. The results indicate the following: (1) The mean relative errors of vitamin E, protein, fat, and TAA concentration forecasting neural networks are 2.63%, 2.19%, 2.19%, and 2.80%, respectively. The root mean square errors are 1.7 mg/100 g, 0.59%, 1.09%, and 0.77%. The forecasting radial basis function neural networks are of high prediction accuracy, which introduces an empirical case of forecasting the quality of crop based on a systematical soil environmental quality investigation along with a sampling survey of the crops. To set a proper model, interrelation between the selected indexes of input layer and output layer needs to be confirmed first, and a low setting of spread can improve the accuracy; (2) Soil in the studied area is under severe salinization, and concentrations of soil chemical properties mostly show an evident regional difference between the three experimental fields. However, the vitamin E, protein, and TAA concentrations of Helianthus annuus seeds all stabilize in a certain range despite the different soil environments. The mean fat concentration of Helianthus annuus seeds collected from Nongan and Daan exceeds those from Tongyu by approximately 5%, which shows a relatively evident regional difference.

Description: Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 394: Decreased Landscape Ecological Security of Peri-Urban Cultivated Land Following Rapid Urbanization: An Impediment to Sustainable Agriculture Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su10020394 Authors: Dan Yu Dongyan Wang Wenbo Li Shuhan Liu Yuanli Zhu Wenjun Wu Yongheng Zhou The sustainable management of peri-urban agriculture requires cultivated land to not only be a source of food production, but also contribute ecological resources. This paper presents a method for assessing the landscape ecological security (LES) of peri-urban cultivated land that considers both cultivated landscape and interactions with the surrounding landscape. The situation in Changchun City was assessed at three time nodes. Furthermore, its spatiotemporal variations in several landscape characteristics were also measured. The results suggest that the peri-urban cultivated landscape was affected to varying extents by urbanization. The metrics of PD (patch density), ED (edge density), AWMSI (area-weighted mean shape index), FRAC (fractal dimension) and DIVISION (landscape division index) progressively increased during urbanization for cultivated land within 20 km of the urban gravity center. Elevated fragmentation and vulnerability of the cultivated landscape was also detected. The traditional method for quantifying LES of cultivated land neglects interactions with other landscape types. When the impacts of the ecological and construction landscapes were included, the results better reflected the dynamics of cultivated landscape in a peri-urban area. Decreased LES of cultivated land poses an impediment to the sustainable peri-urban agriculture, and better management practices should be applied for maintaining the LES of peri-urban cultivated land resources.