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To explore the distribution of food demand and the projected trend in future food demand in China, this paper analyzed the change in current (1998–2012) per-capita demand for grain, grain-consuming and herbivorous livestock products, and predicted the food demand in 2020. The results indicated that in 1998–2012, the national per-capita consumption of grain ration declined by about 36.66%, and the per-capita consumption of grain-consu-ming and herbivorous livestock products increased by about 48% and 34.09%, respectively. The grain-consu-ming livestock products have become the primary source of both calories and protein for consumers. The proportion of herbivorous livestock products in consumer diets has increased steadily and there has been huge potential in substituting beef and mutton for pork in this dynamic market. The demand for food in different provinces of China is highly variable, which is important for planning grassland agriculture development and ensuring food safety. The demand for grain, and grain-consuming and herbivorous livestock products will increase by about 3.3%, 20% and 14% respectively by 2020. Based on the food demand and trend in the development of grassland agriculture, the 31 provinces in China are divided into three priority groups for grassland agriculture development.

International audience; John Hodgson (1937-2018) is renowned worldwide as a passionate and principled researcher, dedicated to the study of interactions between grazing livestock and pasture sward, and to whole-system management of grassland. He published over 250 scientific outputs during his 50-year career, and inspired generations of grazing ecologists. Following his upbringing on a mixed-livestock farm in the Yorkshire Dales, John received BSc, PhD and DSc from the University of Leeds, UK. He worked in research institutes in Hurley, England and Penicuik, Scotland, before taking a Chair in Agronomy at Massey University, New Zealand in 1986. There, he progressed to become Head of School for the Environment. John retired from university life in 2002, but never left academia. John's global research legacy is reflected in the international authorship of this memorial review. His international impact is demonstrated by the supervision of over 50 PhD students from all over the world, and by his knowledge-sharing travels to South America and China. His peers will remember him as a thoughtful and collaborative scholar. His students will remember him as an inspiring and caring mentor. He helped to revolutionize the way that grasslands are managed, in the face of global environmental change and increasing demand on grazed systems. John lost a long battle with Parkinson's disease in October 2018 and is survived by his wife, Ruth, and five children. His own research was often dedicated to his father, Dick Hodgson, and the first author of this tribute wishes to do the same.

Pratacultural science refers to the study of grassland agriculture, which is a branch of agricultural science. It was not until 1980s that the modern prataculture took shape in China although the country has a long history of grassland agriculture. China has developed its own discipline system of pratacultural science in assimilating the academic tradition of Europe, North America and Russia. The pratacultural science of China consists of the studies of three major parts, namely the three factor groups (the biotic, abiotic and social factor groups), three interfaces (the plant-land interface, the pasture-livestock interface and the pasture/animal-market interface), and four production subsystems (the pre-plant production, the plant production, the animal production and the post-biotic production subsystems). The functioning of pratacultural science is maintained by its multidimensional structure. In the past three decades, the consumption of cereals as food by Chinese people has been declining while that of food of animal origin has been increasing rapidly, leading to a sharp increase in the demand for feed and forage crops. Grassland agriculture, with its main outputs based on vegetative growth rather than reproductive growth of plants, is more efficient as well as more ecological than the arable agriculture only relying on grain production. Grassland agriculture is bound to gradually replace the traditional arable agriculture in China, becoming the main stream of the agriculture of China, and thus to mitigate the problems in China's agricultural development. With the demand by the society and the unprecedented support from the national government, China's modern pratacultural science has a never-had opportunity for its develop. Currently China is at a leading position in some research areas of pratacultural science in the world. © 2016, Science Press. All right reserved.

China's food security has a great influence on the world, and has always been the top priority in China. In recent years, as the concept of food security is evolving into one of nutrition security and the importance of food diversity is increasing, research based on nutrition security and broad food systems are increasingly needed in today's China. Thus, not only grain for human consumption, but also animal foods have been integrated into the Food Equivalent, which is used to analyze China's current agriculture system and reveal the water resource distribu- tion. The results indicated that the average animal food consumption has risen by 78.6%, and now China's daily supply of animal food per capita has reached about 50% of that in the USA and 80% of that in the South Korea. So there exist an obvious disparity in animal food supply between China and these two countries. It is impossible for the China's current agricultural system to achieve the level in the USA. Under China's current agricultural system, the consumption proportion of feed grain had surpassed the consumption of food grain, increased sharply from 33% in 1992 to 67% in 2011. However, the growth potential of total grain output is approaching an upper limit, so the continued growth of feed grain demand exerts great pressure on the China's food supply. The discordance of the spatial distribution of water resource and virtual water revealed that China's current agriculture system had a low efficiency in being able to achieve food and nutrition security. China's current "grain farming" cannot meet the demand of increasing nutrition and appropriate resource utilization. The implementation of grassland agriculture appears feasible and necessary for saving feed grain, providing a large number of high-quality animal foods and appropriate water resource utilization.

The fundament of system coupling is heterogeneity, and the basic prerequisite is that there are connective corridors in the same type between ecosystems. The landscape ecological mechanism of system coupling is the spatial difference of non-biotic environment and the heterogeneity caused by disturbances. The force or energy of system coupling is disturbances. From in the view of landscape ecology, system coupling is the merging process of different landscape elements between different landscape ecosystems followed by the process of character changing of landscape elements with scale changing. Based on the essence of disturbances, system coupling can be divided into two types as natural system coupling and artificial system coupling. Natural system coupling is the base of artificial system coupling, and hence, the enhance of eco-productivity of coupling system is based on the optimization of artificial system coupling.

Oasis landscape ecosystem is composed of 10 landscape elements, i.e., residence land, cultivated land, grassland, forestland, water area, water system, road, rocky desert, sandy desert, and gravel desert. Among the elements, cultivated land formed by human being production covers the most of the area, is most connected, and hence, is the matrix of the oasis landscape ecosystem. Residence land, grassland, forestland, water area, rocky desert, sandy desert, and gravel desert are patches. Residence land and forestland generate from human being production, while rocky desert, gravel desert and sandy desert are the remnant with the human being disturbance. Water region and grassland are the environmental resources remnant after natural disturbance. Water system and road are corridors. Cultivated land dominated in plant production should be utilized with more productive layers through developing animal production other than expanding used-area to maintain the landscape heterogeneity and diversity of the oasis landscape ecosystem. For remnant and environmental resource patches, it should be profitable in preserving and stabilizing landscape heterogeneity and diversity, exploiting the functions of water and soil conservation, tourism, windbreak and sand fixation. For landscape elements remnant only, it should be fruitful in avoiding degeneration of the landscape pattern to explore their preceding plant production with moderate plant production.