Researching the impact of factor flow on urban land use efficiency (ULUE) is significant in alleviating the contradiction between the accelerated promotion of urbanization and the inefficient use of urban land. This paper theoretically analyzes the impact mechanism of the flow of the three major factors of production—land, capital, and labor—on ULUE. On this basis, taking 54 cities in the urban agglomeration in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in China as the research object, the stochastic frontier model, fixed effect model, and K-means clustering method are used to empirically analyze the impact of the flow of labor, capital, and land on ULUE. The heterogeneous effect of factor flow on ULUE in different urbanization stages is also discussed. The results are as follows: (1) Labor flow and capital flow play a significant role in promoting ULUE; land flow plays the opposite role. (2) With the continuous improvement of the level of urbanization, the promotion effect of labor flow first decreases and then increases, while the promotion effect of capital flow continues to decrease, and the inhibitory effect of land flow is significant in the initial stage and expansion stage of urbanization, and the effect increases gradually, but it is not significant in the mature stage. (3) The level of urbanization has an obvious threshold effect on factor flow. There are single thresholds for labor and land flow, and there is a double threshold for capital flow. Research conclusions: we should continue to promote the market-oriented reform of factors, break the institutional shackles which restrict the free flow of factors, implement policies according to the city and the stage, and give full play to the positive impact of factor flow on ULUE.

China’s National Key Ecological Function Areas (NKEFAs) provide important ecosystem services but lose significant development opportunities. An NKEFA consists of a few National Key Ecological Function Counties (NKEFCs). China’s central government annually makes fiscal transfers to NKEFCs to compensate for their fiscal imbalance and ecosystem protection costs. The eco-compensation coefficient (ECC), together with the fiscal revenue and expenditure gap (FREG), determines the transfer payment, but the central government fails to provide practical methods for its estimation. This article proposes a framework for ECC estimation by integrating ecosystem service supply (ESS), ecosystem protection cost (EPC), and public service provision capability (PSC) of NKEFCs, and clarifies the criteria and indicators for ESS, EPC, and PSC evaluation. The framework was implemented in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YZEB), and the results were compared with the payments in the current central-to-local fiscal transfer (CTLFT) system. The key findings and conclusions include: (1) The payment in the current CTLFT system mainly depends on the FREG rather than ESS and EPC of NKEFCs. (2) Some counties are notably under-compensated because their ESS or EPC are underestimated, or the province that administers them has a stronger fiscal capability. (3) The framework contributes to fair allocation and efficient use of eco-compensation payments by improving the ECC estimation method and identifying the main stressors and public service weaknesses in NKEFAs. This study gives the following policy implications: (1) Inner-provincial and cross-provincial watershed eco-compensation programs need to be developed to supplement the central-to-local eco-compensation program in the YZEB. (2) Environmental management strategies should be based on the characteristics of stressors and people’s livelihood in NKEFAs.

When focusing on biodiversity maintenance, ecological security pattern (ESP) planning gradually becomes a multi-objective planning strategy for sustainable development; wildlife conservation and ecosystem health maintenance should be balanced with local economic development and people’s livelihood enhancement goals. This study focuses on ESP mapping in the Qinling-Daba Mountain area, which is an ecologically significant and socioeconomically underdeveloped area. The tradeoff between conservation and development is made by varying the area of ecological sources and incorporating ecosystem service tradeoffs into ecological source identification through multi-scenario designation. ESPs under six scenarios were generated based on the minimum resistance model, and the important ecological corridors and strategic points in each scenario were identified and compared. The results show the following: (1) The scenario that sets around 30 percent of the study area as ecological sources maintains the integrity of natural ecosystems and leaves space for food and material supply to residents. (2) In this scenario, the ecological sources are connected by 60 corridors that cross 137 townships with high population densities (>100 people/km²) and intersect with major traffic lines at 71 points. Engineering, management, or education strategies must be taken in these townships or intersections to avoid human–wildlife conflicts. (3) The study area needs to construct both short (north–south) corridors linking proximate ecological sources for species’ daily movement and long (west–east) corridors connecting large and distant sources for species’ seasonal migration and gene flow. (4) The multi-scenario approach turns out to be an effective strategy for ESP planning with considerations for development–conservation tradeoffs.

The multifunctionality of green infrastructure (GI) can be enhanced through intentional planning that promotes synergies among various functions while minimizing trade-offs. Despite its significance, methodologies for implementing this approach remain underexplored. This paper presents an application-oriented framework for GI planning that emphasizes the relationship between GI functional performance and the provision of ecosystem services. By reframing the issues of multifunctional synergies and trade-offs as quantifiable and spatially explicit problems associated with ecosystem services, the framework offers both a conceptual foundation and technical protocols for practical application. This framework was implemented in the Qinling–Daba Mountain Area (QDMB) in China to evaluate its practicality and identify potential challenges. The planned GI system aims to fulfill multiple functions, including biodiversity maintenance, water and soil conservation, eco-farming, and ecotourism development. Additionally, 73 wildlife corridors were established to connect GI elements, thereby enhancing habitat services for biodiversity. Furthermore, the analysis identified 245 townships and 273 sites as strategic areas and points requiring targeted intervention to mitigate potential multifunctional trade-offs. These locations are characterized by their location within protected areas, protected buffer zones, or wildlife corridors, or at the intersection of wildlife corridors with existing transportation infrastructure. The findings validate the framework’s practicality and highlight the necessity for additional research into the capacity of GI to support diverse human activities and the approaches to enhance GI elements’ connectivity for multifunctionality.

Protected Areas (PAs) are essential for global biodiversity conservation, yet assessing their management and conservation effectiveness remains a formidable challenge. While remote sensing (RS) enables synoptic, large-scale monitoring, existing reviews are often fragmented—either decoupled from PA governance contexts or confined to isolated threat mappings. To bridge this gap, this review proposes a dual-dimensional analytical framework integrating management effectiveness and conservation effectiveness. Based on the literature retrieved via a systematic Boolean search in the Web of Science, we first establish a multi-source RS technology stack covering space-borne optical, radar, nighttime-light, LiDAR and cloud-computing platforms. We then review RS applications within the two dimensions. For management effectiveness, we trace the progression from single-disturbance tracking to integrated pressure assessments using counterfactual matching designs. For conservation effectiveness, we synthesize advances in biodiversity dynamics, ecosystem pattern integrity, quality evaluation, and ecosystem service quantification. Our review demonstrates that RS has become a major component of large-scale PA evaluation, revealing measurable successes while highlighting the risk of overestimating conservation outcomes when relying solely on greenness-based proxies. Persistent challenges include the lack of standardized, biome-specific assessment frameworks and the disconnect between biophysical monitoring and socio-ecological drivers. Addressing these gaps requires unified evaluation systems aligned with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, AI-driven multi-sensor fusion, and the operationalization of RS into routine PA governance to support the “30 × 30” target and ecological product value realization.