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With the exploitation of rare earth elements (REE) in southern China, desertification has become a serious ecological problem in this region. To accurately understand the desertification process in mining areas and formulate targeted ecological restoration programs, taking the Lingbei mining area in Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province as the study area, we explored desertification information extraction methods, desertification dynamics monitoring, and desertification drivers in REE mining areas using multisource data from 1986 to 2021. The results show that from the method of extracting desertification information, Random Forest is the prominent (83.33%), followed by Albedo–NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) space (74.44%), and thirdly Linear Spectral Mixture Model (65.56%). From 1986 to 2021, the desertification land area in Lingbei mining areas first increased and then decreased, showing a reverse trend, but it has not recovered to the pre‐mining level. The government's ecological reclamation measures are the key factors for the restoration of desertification land. There are still 17.81 km2 areas that have not been restored, of which 2.16 km2 are at the level of severe desertification. Moderate desertification and light desertification have not been completely curbed, which needs continuous attention. Vegetation coverage has the highest explanatory power to the distribution of land desertification in mining areas, followed by land use classification, indicating that human activities have a great influence on the spatial differentiation of land desertification in mining areas, and it is necessary to pay attention to regional balanced and sustainable development in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tungsten disulfide nanosheets(WS2) and dandelion-like platinum–silver nanoparticles(PtAg NCs) were synthesized by hydrothermal method and seed-mediated growth approach, and a novel dopamine(DA) electrochemical sensor based on PtAg/WS2/GCE was developed and a new method for detecting DA was established. The investigation of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy(TEM) exhibited that dandelion-like PtAg NCs were successfully dispersed on the surface of WS2 nanosheets with the size about ~ 10 nm and the thickness of WS2 nanosheet could be estimated to be 3.1 ± 0.02 nm with a lattice constants of 0.6 ± 0.03 nm, X-ray diffraction(XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy(XPS) patterns proved PtAg exists as alloy form and both were metallic phases. The electrochemical results revealed the obtained sensors possessed ideal electrocatalytic activity toward DA with a wide linear range of 0.6 μM to 1 mM(R2 = 0.9991), high sensitivity (348.8 μA·mM−1·cm−2), low detection limit 0.2 μM (S/R = 3), the relative standard deviation (RSD) was estimated to be 2.3%, current respond toward DA remains 92.79% after several day, showing a good stability, repeatability and selectivity. Moreover, compared with other similar DA sensors, the linear range of the sensor was 2 orders of magnitude wider, and the detection limit was 5 times lower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]