Water, land, energy, and food are fundamental resources for human survival and ecological stability, yet they face intensifying pressure from surging demands and spatial mismatches. Integrated governance of their interconnected nexus is pivotal to achieving sustainable development. In this study, we analyze the water-land-energy-food (WLEF) nexus synergies in China’s North China Plain, a vital grain base for China’s food security. We develop a city-level WLEF evaluation framework and employ a coupling coordination model to assess spatiotemporal patterns of the WLEF system from 2010 to 2022. Additionally, we diagnose critical internal and external influencing factors of the WLEF coupling system, using obstacle degree modeling and geographical detectors. The results indicate that during this period, the most critical internal factor was per capita water resource availability. The impact of the external factor—urbanization level—was characterized by fluctuation and a general upward trend, and by 2022, it had become the dominant influencing factor. Results indicated that the overall development of the WLEF system exhibited a fluctuating trend of initial increasing then decreasing during the study period, peaking at 0.426 in 2016. The coupling coordination level of the WLEF system averaged around 0.5, with the highest value (0.526) in 2016, indicating a marginally coordinated state. Regionally, a higher degree of coordination was presented in the southern regions of the North China Plain compared with the northern areas. Anhui province achieved the optimal coordination, while Beijing consistently ranked lowest. The primary difference lies in the abundant water resources in Anhui, in contrast to the water scarcity in Beijing. Internal diagnostic analysis identified per capita water availability as the primary constraint on system coordination. External factors, including urbanization rate, primary industry’s added value, regional population, and rural residents’ disposable income, exhibited growing influence on the system over time. This study provides a theoretical framework for WLEF system coordination and offers decision-making support for optimizing resource allocation and promoting sustainable development in comparable regions.

Monitoring and evaluating the state variables of garden ecological processes on a long-term scale is one of the hot issues in current garden ecosystem observation research. In view of the problems of poor real-time transmission and storage of observation data in garden ecosystem observation stations, low data sharing, serious data fragmentation, weak construction of big data analysis platform, and lack of real-time prediction and early warning of garden fires, this paper combines remote sensing technology, vorticity correlation technology, and monitoring and sensing technologies such as quadratic survey technology and wireless sensor network, realizes long-term and continuous comprehensive observation of water, soil, air, and growth elements in garden ecosystems, provides the real-time automatic storage and display of carbon budget data, water flux data, flux of energy and meteorological data between garden ecosystems and the atmosphere, storage and display of garden ecosystem service functions, and quantity of value, realizes the monitoring of garden fires and the prediction and early warning of garden fire risks, and can also provide technical support and exploration for the long-term automated observation used for garden ecosystems.