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China has implemented forest policies and expanded protected areas to halt deforestation and protect giant panda habitats. These policies simultaneously encouraged local communities to raise livestock that then freely range in forests. This grazing had unintended consequences. As an alternative livelihood, it has become the most prevalent human disturbance across the panda's range. How do free-ranging livestock impact giant panda habitats and what are the implications for future conservation and policy on a larger scale? We use Wanglang National Nature Reserve as a case study. It has seen a nine-fold livestock increase during past 15 years. We combined bamboo survey plots, GPS collar tracking, long-term monitoring, and species distribution modelling incorporating species interaction to understand the impacts across spatial and temporal scales. Our results showed that livestock, especially horses, lead to a significant reduction of bamboo biomass and regeneration. The most intensively used areas by livestock are in the valleys, which are also the areas that pandas prefer. Adding livestock presence to predictive models of the giant panda's distribution yielded a higher accuracy and suggested livestock reduce panda habitat by 34%. Pandas were driven out of the areas intensively used by livestock. We recommend the nature reserve carefully implement a livestock ban and prioritise removing horses because they cause the greater harm. To give up livestock, local communities prefer long-term subsidies or jobs to a one-time payment. Thus, we recommend the government provide payments for ecosystem services that create jobs in forest stewardship or tourism while reducing the number of domestic animals.

Despite broad recognition that nature reserves protect local biodiversity and rare species effectively, the wider benefits and costs provided by this conservation approach relative to alternative approaches are not well understood. This study addressed this research gap by quantifying differences in ecosystem services provision of two alternative conservation management approaches in a strictly protected nature reserve in China based on (1) existing strict regulations versus (2) extrapolation of those in an adjacent Natural Forest Protection Project (NFPP) allowing the use of natural resources by local communities. Using a new Toolkit for Ecosystem Services Site-based Assessment (TESSA), we demonstrated the nature reserve provides more valuable ecosystem services than it would have done if managed like the adjacent NFPP. In comparison, the nature reserve provides greater benefits in terms of carbon stock, carbon sequestration, and recreation, at the national and global scale. The monetary benefits of the nature reserve could cover all conservation management costs, making it a more worthwhile approach for conservation and beneficiaries. Thus, our study highlights the importance of strictly protected nature reserves in China, demonstrating the importance of balancing conservation and development to governmental managers and local residents, and could be used to guide eco-compensation for local beneficiaries.

Functional no-flow is a topic of considerable interest in the research and management of the Yellow River. The operation of the Xiaolangdi Reservoir has been a source of concern regarding hydraulic characteristics and hydro-environmental responses. However, the impacts of the reservoir on functional no-flow events have not been reported to date. Using a complete set of daily hydrological data from four key hydrological stations for the past six decades and at three different temporal scales (year, wet season and dry season), the differences in incoming water and functional no-flow events have been compared before and after the Xiaolangdi Reservoir began operation, using two sets of critical runoff values that were summarized from previous studies. The results indicate that the frequency of functional no-flow events has decreased since the Xiaolangdi Reservoir began to operate, based on critical runoff or discharge values defined by long term hydrological records, and the frequency decreased more when the critical values defining the new situation were used. However, functional no-flow events still occurred in the Lower Yellow River, especially in the lower reach during the wet season. The degree of severity of the functional no-flow events and the magnitude and variation of daily discharge are strongly linearly related before and after the reservoir began operation, regardless of which set of critical values were used to identify the functional no-flow events.

Two chitooligosaccharide samples (COS1 and COS2) were prepared by enzymatic degradation of chitosan. The molecular weight of the main component was determined by mass spectrometry to be 2340 and 4303, respectively. They showed cholesteric liquid crystal structures in concentrated solutions. The critical concentrations to form a lyotropic liquid crystalline phase in formic acid were measured by means of polarized optical microscopy, refractometry and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The results from the three methods agreed with each other. The experimental value of COS2 was quantitatively consistent with that calculated according to Khokhlov and Semenov theory. But the experimental value of COS1 diverged from the theoretical one, which is explained by the inaccuracy at higher concentrations of the second virial approximation underlying this theory.