Description: Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 857: Mapping Ecosystem Service Bundles to Detect Distinct Types of Multifunctionality within the Diverse Landscape of the Yangtze River Basin, China Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su10030857 Authors: Lingqiao Kong Hua Zheng Yi Xiao Zhiyun Ouyang Cong Li Jingjing Zhang Binbin Huang The tradeoffs and synergies of ecosystem services are widely discussed and recognized. However, explicit information for understanding and managing the complex relationships of multiple ecosystem services at regional scales is still lacking, which often leads to the degradation of important ecosystem services due to one ecosystem service being enhanced over another. We assessed the biodiversity and the production of nine ESs (ecosystem services) across 779 counties in the Yangtze River Basin, the largest basin in China. Then, we mapped the distribution of ES for each county and used correlations and “partitioning around medoids” clustering analysis to assess the existence of ES bundles. We found five distinct types of bundles of ecosystem services spatially agglomerated in the landscape, which could be mainly explained by land use, slope and altitude gradients. Our results also show landscape-scale tradeoffs between provisioning and almost all regulating services (and biodiversity), and synergies among almost all regulating services (and biodiversity). Mapping ecosystem service bundles can identify areas in a landscape where ecosystem management has produced exceptionally desirable or undesirable sets of ecosystem services, and can also provide explicit, tailored information on landscape planning for ecosystem service conservation and the design of payment policies for ecosystem services within diverse landscapes at watershed scales.

Description: Sensors, Vol. 17, Pages 1812: Multiple Cracks Detection in Pipeline Using Damage Index Matrix Based on Piezoceramic Transducer-Enabled Stress Wave Propagation Sensors doi: 10.3390/s17081812 Authors: Guofeng Du Qingzhao Kong Hua Zhou Haichang Gu Cracks in oil and gas pipelines cause leakage which results in property damage, environmental pollution, and even personal injury or loss of lives. In this paper, an active-sensing approach was conducted to identify the crack damage in pipeline structure using a stress wave propagation approach with piezoceramic transducers. A pipeline segment instrumented with five distributed piezoceramic transducers was used as the testing specimen in this research. Four cracks were artificially cut on the specimen, and each crack had six damage cases corresponding to different crack depths. In this way, cracks at different locations with different damage degrees were simulated. In each damage case, one piezoceramic transducer was used as an actuator to generate a stress wave to propagate along the pipeline specimen, and the other piezoceramic transducers were used as sensors to detect the wave responses. To quantitatively evaluate the crack damage status, a wavelet packet-based damage index matrix was developed. Experimental results show that the proposed method can evaluate the crack severity and estimate the crack location in the pipeline structure based on the proposed damage index matrix. The sensitivity of the proposed method decreases with increasing distance between the crack and the mounted piezoceramic transducers.