Understanding the spatial distribution, temporal dynamics, and driving factors of soybean cultivation is critical for yield estimation, agricultural planning, and national food security.  However, high-resolution, long-term, and nationwide datasets of soybean cultivation in China remain scarce.  This study developed a 30-m resolution dataset of soybean in China from 2000–2022 using multi-source data (ChinaSoyA30m), and analyzed the spatiotemporal dynamics and driving forces of soybean cultivation.  The phenological characteristics of major crops across China were evaluated to generate training samples for supervised classification.  Gap statistics, K-means clustering, and spectral angle mapping were employed to enhance classification reliability.  A supervised classification approach was implemented on Google Earth Engine (GEE) using dense Landsat data to produce annual soybean maps.  ChinaSoyA30m demonstrates competitive performance compared to six existed soybean datasets, with strong correlations with provincial, prefectural, and county statistics (R²=0.95, 0.89, and 0.80), and the F1 scores validated against ground truth data were 70.16, 80.40, and 78.38%.  Since 2000, the soybean planting area has exhibited a fluctuating upward trend with distinct regional characteristics.  Northern China emerged as the primary production area, characterized by a stable planting centroid and small spatial variation.  The primary driver of soybean area dynamics was the “value added of primary industry”, while gross power of agricultural machinery was a significant factor in North China, highlighting regional differences in driving mechanisms.  This study provides the first long-term, high-resolution soybean planting dataset for China and offers valuable insights into the sustainable development of soybean cultivation.

To ensure nutritional intake and reduce the occurrence of diet-related diseases, it is urgent to promote a healthy diet.  At present, short video apps with information dissemination, social interaction, and online shopping are widely used, which have changed the way people obtain and exchange information, and the way of life and consumption.  Exploring whether short video app use can affect food consumption choices offers new insights for promoting dietary transformation among residents.  Based on the first-hand micro-survey data of 2,000 rural households across 100 villages in 5 Chinese provinces in 2023, this study examines the effects of short video app use on rural household food consumption.  The results show that short video app use can increase households’ per capita food consumption and dietary diversity, mainly by raising consumption of aquatic products, fruits, poultry, pork and soybeans, but it does not improve households’ food health index.  Short video app use promotes dietary diversity mainly by improving nutrition awareness.  Its positive effect on dietary diversity is stronger among high-income groups.  It also improves dietary diversity in villages that have express delivery points, but lack food markets and are remotely located.  Short video app use can help improve nutrition awareness and to a certain extent, reduce the impact of location and supporting facilities on food access.

Global agricultural trade helps to balance the supply and demand for food worldwide, stimulating economic growth and promoting political stability.  However, agriculture’s inherent vulnerability to extreme weather events and other natural disasters has a significant impact on the industry, which is further amplified through trade and can threaten global food security.  This study examines both the mortality and economic losses caused by natural disasters and identifies the mechanisms through which these disasters affect international agricultural trade from 2002 to 2023.  The results show that natural disasters cause a decline in the volume of agricultural exports from affected countries, which is much larger than the decline observed in other industries.  Despite the high demand inelasticity of agricultural products, which typically leads to increased export prices when production declines, the value of exports still declined significantly over the study period, implying an average annual export loss of 6.21 billion USD and 39,359 jobs.  Geological disasters primarily hinder agricultural exports by increasing transportation costs, climate-related disasters by damaging production systems, and biological disasters by increasing storage and compliance costs.  We show that disasters have a more devastating effect on agricultural production in less developed countries, which diminishes their global product competitiveness, reduces export prices, and intensifies overall disaster impacts.  We also show that countries with low disaster risk, which lack emergency response experience, incur up to 2.053 million USD in agricultural export losses due to disasters.  In addition, political risks interact with natural disasters, thereby amplifying their negative impact on agricultural exports.  In terms of product heterogeneity, we find that the destructive impact of disasters on primary agricultural products extends through the supply chain to processed agricultural goods, affecting both their production and export.  We show that disasters exert an even broader influence on the agricultural system through secondary effects that are 2.83 times greater than the direct impacts.  Our findings provide valuable insights and highlight the need for countries affected by disasters to establish disaster prevention and recovery mechanisms to help minimize agricultural trade losses and safeguard global food security.

The ongoing commercialization of genetically modified (GM) crops continues to enhance global grain yields, improve crop quality, and reduce pesticide usage. These technological advancements have effectively propelled agricultural production systems toward sustainable transformation. Specifically, GM crops address core challenges such as pest infestations, weed proliferation, and arable land constraints, emerging as a pivotal new productive force in agriculture. This study systematically examines the global spatial distribution patterns of GM crops in 2024 and provides an indepth analysis of the driving forces and evolving regional trends, offering critical informational support and strategic guidance for innovation in agricultural science and technology. In 2024, the global GM crop cultivation area reached 209.8 million hectares, a 1.7% year-on-year increase. GM Glycine max (soybean) and Zea mays (maize) dominated the landscape, accounting for 50.0 and 32.5% of the total area, respectively. Among them, maize with stacked traits of insect resistance and herbicide tolerance accounts for 92.5% of GM maize. The share of cultivation in developing countries expanded substantially, with Brazil and Vietnam emerging as regional growth drivers. Policy support and the diffusion of advanced technologies were identified as core driving forces. Concurrently, applications of gene-editing technology accelerated, and several countries approved novel tr aits such as drought tolerance and disease resistance, marking substantial progress in the commercialization of next-generation GM crops. This research provides multidimensional insights and strategic guidance to support global agricultural biotechnology development, promoting the transition of biotechnology breeding into the ‘4.0 era’.

Global cotton production faces mounting pressure to reconcile rising fiber demand with urgent sustainability imperatives, including water scarcity mitigation, greenhouse gas reduction, and agrochemical pollution control. Traditional practices, constrained by fragmented objectives and inherent trade-offs among yield, fiber quality, labor efficiency, and ecological impact, struggle to address these systemic challenges. Building upon previous concept of collaborative cultivation, this review for the first time introduces and comprehensively elaborates multi-objective integrated cotton cultivation (MOICC) - also referred to as integrated cotton cultivation (ICC) - a transformative framework centered on three pillars: dynamic trade-off management (e.g., region-specific priority adjustment), systematic technology integration (precision seeding, dense planting, chemical regulation, water-nutrient synergy, and targeted defoliation), and resource circularity (spatiotemporal optimization and waste recycling). MOICC overcomes sustainability bottlenecks by leveraging key physiological mechanisms, including ethylene signaling to enhance stress-resilient seedling establishment, jasmonate-mediated pathways to improve water/nutrient efficiency, canopy light competition coupled with hormonal regulation to eliminate manual pruning, and growth regulators to concentrate boll maturation. Case studies from diverse Chinese agro-ecosystems (e.g., Xinjiang, Yangtze/Yellow River basins) and intercropping systems demonstrate significant synergies: increased yield (8–22%), improved resource efficiency (water use efficiency increased by ≥20%, and nitrogen productivity up to 35 kg kg–1), and enhanced environmental performance (labor reduction of 30–40%, carbon footprint reduction of 24–37%, and agrochemical savings: nitrogen reduction of 15–20% and pesticides reduction of 25%). Crucially, MOICC resolves core conflicts through integrated optimization: yield vs. quality (via ≥70% inner-position bolls), labor-saving vs. eco-safety (precision defoliant timing), and productivity vs. emissions (root-zone nitrogen monitoring). Future research priorities include deciphering multi-scale stress adaptation, developing intelligent decision-support systems (e.g., AHP-NSGA-II integration), advancing carbon-neutral value chains, addressing socio-economic adoption barriers, and fostering policy synergy. Overall, MOICC establishes a conceptually globally scalable pathway toward high-yield, superior-quality, resource-efficient, and ecologically sustainable cotton production, with potential applicability to other major cropping systems.

Probiotics are considered to exert beneficial effects in humans and animals by modulating the structure and metabolic functions of the gut microbiota. Therefore, the identification of functional probiotics and in-depth exploration of the characteristics and applicability of probiotics are of paramount significance for the development of more effective probiotic products and the formulation of personalized probiotic treatment strategies in the fields of human health and livestock farming. However, due to current limitations in sequencing technologies and considering that microbial communities may encompass closely related lineages, rendering metagenome assembly complex, the generation of complete metagenome-assembled genomes (cMAGs) is hindered. This limitation constrains our comprehensive resolution at the probiotic strain level. In this review, we summarized the effects of probiotics on gut microbiota balance and host health from a functional perspective. The technical methods of functional probiotics identification were summarized from the technical point of view. Furthermore, we introduced methods for microbial metagenome assembly to elucidate the associated progress and advantages and disadvantages of these approaches. Finally, we highlight more advanced metagenomic assembly techniques that may help us assemble high-fidelity intestinal metagenomes, providing powerful tools for the identification of functional probiotics.