Publications by authors named "Guangqian Ren"

Heat waves (HW) are projected to become more frequent and intense with climate change, potentially enhancing the invasiveness of certain plant species. This study aims to compare the physiological and photosynthetic responses of the invasive and its native congener under simulated heat wave conditions (40.1 °C, derived from local historical data).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Global climate change and invasive plants significantly impact biodiversity and ecosystem functions. This study focuses on the effects of progressive warming on microbial communities within the invasion community, simulated through six stages of invasion progression, from minimal to dominant presence alongside native , in bulk soils collected from a natural habitat and cultivated under controlled greenhouse conditions. Utilizing high-throughput sequencing and microbial community analysis on 72 samples collected from the invasion community, the shifts in soil microbiota under varying warming scenarios were investigated (+0 °C, +1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study investigates how variations in diurnal temperature and phosphorus concentration affect the growth of native Artemisia argyi and invasive Solidago canadensis under intraspecific and interspecific competition. We conducted factorial experiments to assess the impacts of warming, including an increased diurnal temperature range (DTRinc), a symmetric increase in diurnal temperature range (DTRsys), a decreased diurnal temperature range (DTRdec) and phosphorus application (5 g and 10 g P m yr) on both intra- and inter-specific competition among plants. The results indicated that (1) the DTRsys for A.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cadmium (Cd) toxicity induces significant disruptions in growth and development, plants have developed strategies to alleviate metal toxicity promoting establishment even during herbivores infestation. The study demonstrates that W. trilobata maintains growth and development under the combined stress of Cd exposure and herbivore invasion by Spodoptera litura, in contrast to W.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The diversity-invasibility hypothesis predicts that native plant communities with high biodiversity should be more resistant to invasion than low biodiversity communities. However, observational studies have found that there is often a positive relationship between native community diversity and invasibility. Pollutants were not tested for their potential to cause this positive relationship.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The legacy effects of invasive plant species can obstruct the recovery of native ecosystems, particularly under conditions of nitrogen deposition, which favors the growth of invasives and can lead to further invasions.
  • The study hypothesizes that nitrogen deposition exacerbates these legacy effects, exploring mechanisms related to community structure, nitrogen metabolism, geochemical cycles, and microbial interactions.
  • Findings indicate that microorganisms, particularly nitrogen-fixing bacteria, play a crucial role in this process, influencing plant-soil feedback and offering insights for managing invasive species and enhancing ecosystem recovery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Plants exposed to a variety of abiotic and biotic stressors including environmental pollution and global warming pose significant threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services. Despite substantial literature documenting how plants adapt to distinct stressors, there still is a lack of knowledge regarding responses to multiple stressors and how these affects growth and development. Exposure of plants to concurrent biotic and abiotic stressors such as cadmium and drought, leads to pronounced inhibition in above ground biomass, imbalance in oxidative homeostasis, nutrient assimilation and stunted root growth, elucidating the synergistic interactions of multiple stressors culminating in adverse physiological outcomes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Despite the significant number of studies that have recently focused on plant invasion and invasive plants' success, many uncertainties still exist on the effects of invasive plant identity and diversity on the native plant response under different levels of diversity. A mixed planting experiment was conducted using the native () and four invasive plants. The treatments consisted of 1, 2, 3, and 4 levels of invasive plants richness in different combinations in competition with the native .

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The input of agro-pollutants, such as microplastics and nanopesticides, on farmlands is widespread and may facilitate biological invasions in agroecosystems. Here, the effects of agro-pollutants that promote invasion of congener species is studied by examining the growth performance of native Sphagneticola calendulacea and its invasive congener, S. trilobata, when grown in a native only, invasive only and mixed community.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Anthropogenic climate change and species invasion are two major threats to biodiversity, affecting the survival and distribution of many species around the world. Studying the responses of invasive species under climate change can help better understand the ecological and genetic mechanisms of their invasion. However, the effects of warming and phosphorus deposition on the phenotype of native and invasive plants are unknown.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - Invasive plants threaten biodiversity and can lead to significant economic losses, and their impacts are likely to be intensified by climate change factors like temperature and precipitation changes.
  • - A review of 176 plant species revealed that while both native and invasive plants may show improved performance when exposed to multiple global change factors, their competitiveness tends to suffer overall, giving invasive plants an edge under certain conditions.
  • - The study highlights the need for more research on the combined effects of climate change on plant invasions, as predicting these invasions based solely on individual factors may not provide an accurate picture of their dynamics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Changes in temperature and nitrogen deposition significantly affect the growth and competition between invasive and native plants, with experimental evidence highlighting these relationships.
  • A greenhouse study showed that nitrogen addition had a strong positive effect on plant performance, particularly during the early stages of invasion, with native plants responding better than invasive ones.
  • The research indicates that the interplay of warming and nitrogen tends to have an additive effect on growth traits rather than a synergistic one, suggesting that environmental changes do not alter competition dynamics significantly, but may provide invasive species an advantage in new habitats.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one of the most important business strategies which helps enterprises obtain competitive advantage and improve performance. Scholars have conducted many beneficial studies on the driving factors of CSR behaviors from the perspective of CEO traits, but rarely focus on the impact of the CEO's early family experiences. This study aims to fill this research gap by investigating the influence of CEO birth order on firms' CSR behaviors, and further exploring the possible moderating effects of the presence of a female sibling and the age gap between the CEO and the closest sibling.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The rapid growth of industrial digitalization and financial support are the main driving forces for the green transformation of China's economy. Aiming to explore how digitalization and financial development impact ecological efficiency (eco-efficiency), this study proposes a unified research framework by integrating multiple technologies using the panel data that covered 30 China's provinces from 2006 to 2018. First, China's provincial digital development index is constructed to measure the level of digitalization, and regional eco-efficiency is estimated by a non-radial data envelope analysis (DEA) model.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Invasive plants cause a global loss of biodiversity, pose a major threat to the environment and economy, and also significantly affect agricultural production and food security. Plant growth regulators (PGRs) are widely used in agricultural production and might also affect invasive weeds distributed around crops in various ways. At present, there are few studies concerning whether there are significant effects of PGRs on invasive weeds.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The microeconomic behavior of enterprises is influenced by the government system and its policies. In this article, we investigate how environmental regulation and environmental decentralization affect enterprise environmental protection investment using the data of China's listed companies from 2009 to 2020 and examine the effect of environmental decentralization on the relationship between environmental regulation and environmental protection investment. First, we find that there is a "U-shaped" relationship between environmental regulation and enterprise environmental protection investment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study expands on the impact of local government environmental regulation on enterprise environmental protection investment. Furthermore, it analyzes the influence promotion pressure of officials has on the scale of enterprise environmental investment. The results show that the environmental protection investment of companies in China is generally insufficient.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Corporate social responsibility is an important business strategy for enterprises. Scholars have conducted much beneficial research on the relationship of executives' recognitive traits and firms' CSR behavior, but rarely focus on the impact of executives' early recognitive traits derived from family sibling interaction. This paper takes Chinese A-shared private listed companies from 2014 to 2017 as the research samples to investigate the effect of the number of executives' siblings on the early family sibling and corporate social responsibility behavior.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Headwater streams around agricultural farmlands can act as important sinks of active nitrogen (N) and potential sources of indirect nitrous oxide (NO) emissions, as well as aggravating agricultural non-point source N pollution. In this study, the dynamic characteristics of the dissolved NO concentration in an agricultural headwater stream in the hilly area of purple soil in the upper reach of the Yangtze River were observed during the period Dec. 2014-Oct.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Agricultural headwater ditches are important pathways of reactive nitrogen loss from adjacent croplands, and also act as hotspots for reactive nitrogen transformation. In this study, NO emissions from a typical agricultural ditch in the hilly area of central Sichuan Basin were measured by the closed static chamber-chemiluminescence method, from December 2014 to November 2015. The results showed that the cumulative NO emissions from the sediment-water interface without vegetation (NV) and the ditch ecosystem with natural vegetation (Ⅴ) were -0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Agricultural headwater ditches, the important locations for retaining and transforming nitrogen derived from the adjacent farmlands, have been regarded as the potential source of nitrous oxide (NO) emission. In this study, NO emissions from a typical agricultural ditch in the Hilly Area of Central Sichuan Basin, were observed by closed static chamber-GC technique during the maize season (rainy season), from June to the end of September. During the study period, cumulative NO emissions in the sediment-water interface without vegetation (NV) and the ditch ecosystem with natural vegetation (V) were 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF