Multifaceted regime shifts of Earth's surface are ongoing dramatically and – in turn – considerably alter the global carbon budget, energy balance and biogeochemical cycles. Sustainably managing terrestrial ecosystems necessitates a deeper comprehension of the diverse and dynamic nature of multicomponent information within these environments. However, comprehensive records of global-scale fractional vegetation and soil information that encompass these structural and functional complexities remain limited. Here, we provide a globally comprehensive record of monthly vegetation and soil fractions during the period 2001–2022 using a spatiotemporally adaptive spectral mixture analysis framework. This product is designed to continuously represent Earth's terrestrial surface as a percentage of five physically meaningful vegetation and soil endmembers, including photosynthetic vegetation (PV), nonphotosynthetic vegetation (NPV), bare soil (BS), ice or snow (IS) and dark surface (DA), with high accuracy and low uncertainty compared to the previous vegetation index and vegetation continuous-field product as well as traditional fully constrained linear spectral mixture models. We also adopt nonparametric seasonal Mann–Kendall tested fractional dynamics to identify shifts based on interactive changes in these fractions. Our results – superior to previous portrayals of the greening planet – not only report a +9.35 × 10⁵ km² change in photosynthetic vegetation, but also explore decreases in nonphotosynthetic vegetation (−2.19 × 10⁵ km²), bare soil (−5.14 × 10⁵ km²) and dark surfaces (−2.27 × 10⁵ km²). In addition, interactive changes in these fractions yield multifaceted regime shifts with important implications, such as a simultaneous increase in PV and NPV in central and southwestern China during afforestation activities, an increase in PV in cropland of China and India due to intensive agricultural development, a decrease in PV and an increase in BS in tropical zones resulting from deforestation. These advantages emphasize that our dataset provides locally relevant information on multifaceted regime shifts at the required scale, enabling scalable modeling and effective governance of future terrestrial ecosystems. The data about five fractional surface vegetation and soil components are available in the Science Data Bank (https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.13287, Sun and Sun, 2023).

Heavy metals in agricultural soils pose a major threat to food safety and human health. Among all heavy metals, cadmium (Cd) is the most problematic with contamination rates of 7% in arable land and 5.3% in facility vegetable growing soils in China. In order to employ a “remediation while producing” mode in the contaminated soils, many remediation approaches have been investigated with unsatisfactory results. Recently, grafting has been reported to have the potential of being environmentally friendly, efficient, widely applicable and low-cost for soil remediation in vegetable production. A review of recent advances in the mechanisms of Cd accumulation in plants as influenced by grafting was conducted, including the processes of root uptake and translocation to the aboveground tissues, and xylem/phloem loading. The impact of grafting on numerous aspects associated with Cd accumulation in plants was found to extend from the rhizosphere soil microbial community, rootstock genetic variation, rootstock-scion interaction to plant responses. By understanding the mechanisms of grafting in Cd detoxification, it provided a theoretical basis for the selection of rootstocks with low Cd accumulation potential and its application as an effective phytoremediation method in Cd contaminated soils.

As an irreplaceable ecological barrier, an ecological conservation developing area (ECDA) is vital for the integrated construction of urban and rural areas and the optimization and adjustment of industrial structures. However, few empirical studies have been conducted on the spatiotemporal variations of agricultural green development (AGD) in the ECDAs of large cities. Based on the green agricultural traits of Beijing and the accessible data, we evaluated the AGD and analyzed its spatial and temporal heterogeneity in Beijing’s ECDAs by constructing a framework with 13 indicators. The results stated that energy consumption is a vital factor in green agriculture production and that the agricultural output value per unit of arable land area is the key to green agricultural revenue. From 2006 to 2016, the AGD index of the ECDA had an increasing trend, until 2012 when it followed a decreasing tendency. The AGD index of the northern region was higher than in the southern ECDA. The obstacle degree model was used to verify the AGD limiting factors, where poor infrastructure, slow agritourism, low labor productivity, and low resource use efficiency varied by districts in the ECDA. Given these findings, our study is conducive to AGD evaluation at the district (county) level for the ECDAs of large cities and provides important policy implications.

Rhizosphere bacteria can have wide-ranging effects on their host plants, influencing plant biochemical and structural characteristics, and overall productivity. The implications of plant-microbe interactions provides an opportunity to interfere agriculture ecosystem with exogenous regulation of soil microbial community. Therefore, how to efficiently predict soil bacterial community at low cost is becoming a practical demand. Here, we hypothesize that foliar spectral traits can predict the diversity of bacterial community in orchard ecosystem. We tested this hypothesis by studying the ecological linkages between foliar spectral traits and soil bacterial community in a peach orchard in Yanqing, Beijing in 2020. Foliar spectral indexes were strongly correlated with alpha bacterial diversity and abundant genera that can promote soil nutrient conversion and utilization, such as Blastococcus, Solirubrobacter, and Sphingomonas at fruit mature stage. Certain unidentified or relative abundance <1% genera were also associated with foliar spectral traits. We selected specific indicators (photochemical reflectance index, normalized difference vegetable index, greenness index, and optimized soil-adjusted vegetation index) of foliar spectral indexes, alpha and beta diversities of bacterial community, and quantified the relations between foliar spectral traits and belowground bacterial community via SEM. The results of this study indicated that foliar spectral traits could powerfully predict belowground bacterial diversity. Characterizing plant attributes with easy-accessed foliar spectral indexes provides a new thinking in untangling the complex plant-microbe relationship, which could better cope with the decreased functional attributes (physiological, ecological, and productive traits) in orchard ecosystem.

As an irreplaceable ecological barrier, the ecological conservation developing area (ECDA) is vital for the integrated construction of urban and rural areas, and optimization and adjustment of industrial structure. Developing green agriculture is the foundation and guarantee for improving the rural ecological environment and meeting the increasing needs of farmers′ income. Issued by the Chinese government, No. 1 Central Document stated the necessity of promoting agricultural green development (AGD) and the related technologies in dealing with ecological pressure and resource shortages, especially for large cities like Beijing. However, few empirical studies have conducted on spatiotemporal variations of AGD in ECDA of large cities. Based on the green agricultural traits of Beijing and the accessible data, we evaluate AGD and analyze its spatial and temporal heterogeneity of Beijing ECDA by constructiing a framework with 13 indicators. The weight coefficients of AGD indicators were calculated by the projection pursuit method, with the district panel data from 2006 to 2016. The results demonstrated that energy consumption is a vital factor of green agriculture production, and agricultural output value per unit of the arable land area is the key to the green agricultural revenue. From 2006 to 2016, the AGD index of ECDA had an increasing trend till 2012, followed by a decreasing tendency. The AGD index of the northern region is higher than the southern of ECDA. The obstacle degree model was used to verify AGD limiting factors. They were poor infrastructure, slow agritourism, low labor productivity, and low resource utilization efficiency that varied by districts in ECDA. Given these findings, our study is conducive to the AGD evaluation at the district (county) level for ECDA of large cities and also provides important policy implications.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are crucial symbiotic microorganisms in terrestrial ecosystems, playing a vital role in maintaining orchard soil health and productivity. However, how organic–and Ca, Mg, Zn fertilizers co-application affect vertical stratification and ecological functions of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in perennial fruit orchards remains unclear. Based on a five-year in situ peach trial, we established three fertilization regimes: low- (LWF), medium- (MWF), and high-input (HWF) regimes. We systematically analyzed the AMF community structure, diversity, and their correlations with soil physicochemical properties, as well as peach tree physiology, fruit yield, and quality across two soil depths: 0–20 cm (topsoil) and 20–40 cm (subsoil). HWF significantly inhibited AMF root colonization rates and spore density (p < 0.05), while reducing community α-diversity AMF α-diversity (p < 0.05), characterized by the enrichment of genera such as Glomus and a decrease in the relative abundance of Rhizoglomus. Redundancy analysis (RDA) identified available Zn (AZn) and Mg (WMg) as key drivers of this restructuring. Integrating RDA results into depth-specific partial least squares structural equation models (PLS-SEM), we found that subsoil AZn/WMg indirectly boosted yield by reshaping AMF composition (β = 0.34, p = 0.006), mediated via improved canopy status (NDVI, PRI). Total effect analysis confirmed the dominant role of subsoil pathways. These findings challenge the prevailing topsoil-centric view of soil microbial ecology and underscore the importance of considering the full soil profile when evaluating the impacts of agricultural practices on beneficial symbionts. We conclude that sustainable management strategies should account for depth-dependent AMF responses to maintain both productivity and belowground biodiversity across the entire rooting zone.