Urban greenness plays a vital role in supporting the ecosystem services of a city. Exploring the dynamics of urban greenness space and their driving forces can provide valuable information for making solid urban planning policies. This study aims to investigate the dynamics of urban greenness space patterns through landscape indices and to apply geographically weighted regression (GWR) to map the spatially varied impact on the indices from economic and environmental factors.

Village committees, as grassroots spontaneously formed by rural collective members in China’s hierarchy system, play an irreplaceable role in the management of rural public affairs. Based on the filed survey dataset taken from three pilot counties/districts in Sichuan province, we explored the significant role that village committees played in farmers’ withdrawal from rural homesteads (WRH).

Grazing leads to the reduction of biomass and plays a critical role in land degradation in arid and semiarid lands. However, the indirect effects of grazing on the ecosystem, e.g., the effect on seed dispersal, have not been well understood. In this study, we built an agent-based model (ABM) to simulate how grazing intensity affects the seed dispersal of elm trees, one of the native vegetation species of temperate woodlands in semiarid lands. The simulated results from the ABM and observed data from the real world were compared to assess the accuracy and validity of the ABM.