How Do Ecological Restoration Projects Affect Trade-Offs and Synergies between Ecosystem Services?

Scientific ecosystem management requires the clarification of the synergic and trade-off relationship between ecosystem services, particularly in the environmentally delicate Loess Plateau region. Previous studies have indirectly deduced that ecological restoration projects affect ESRs by analyzing their impacts on ecosystem services, but there is no direct evidence from the existing research to show whether and to what extent different ecological restoration projects have an impact on trade-off synergies, which weakens the explanatory strength of ecological restoration projects as an important factor affecting ESRs. In this study, based on the spatial mapping of three pairs of relationships between three typical ESs in Fugu County, Shaanxi Province, and the relative contribution of each ecological restoration projects, as well as Ecosystem services and the relationship between them, were explored through the boosted regression tree modeling (BRT). This study proved that different ecological restoration projects have different impacts on ESRs. The results indicated that the three pairs of ESRs obtained among the three ecosystem services in Fugu County could be categorized into two types. The relationship between carbon storage and soil conservation and the relationship between carbon storage and water conservation CS–WC were spatially predominantly trade-offs, and their spatial distributions were highly similar. Various ecological restoration projects have varying effects on ESRs. The connection between ecological restoration projects and ESRs involves a nonlinear transformation, and the change varies from project to project. Based on the above findings, this study further explores the influence process of various types of ecological restoration projects on ESRs, and provides scientific support for optimizing ecosystem management and comprehensive management of the region

The Conceptual Structure of Human Relationships Across Modern and Historical Cultures

A defining characteristic of social complexity in Homo sapiens is the diversity of our relationships. We build various types of connections with people in families, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and online communities. How do we make sense of such complex systems of human relationships? By using natural language processing, online surveys, laboratory cognitive tasks, and computational modelling on diverse modern cultures across the world (n = 20,425) and ancient cultures across 3,000 years of history, we discovered a universal representational space of relationship concepts, comprised of five principal dimensions (formality, activeness, valence, exchange, equality) and three core categories (hostile, public and private relationships). Our work reveals the fundamental cognitive constructs and cultural principles of relationship knowledge and advances our understanding of human sociality