Yellow River Delta National Nature Reserve plays a critical role in ecological conservation, and assessing its ecosystem service value (ESV) is essential for guiding sustainable management strategies that harmonize development and preservation. This study was motivated by the need to generate actionable insights for adaptive conservation planning in this vulnerable coastal region. We evaluated the spatiotemporal dynamics of ESV from 2000 to 2020 using a combination of remote sensing, geographic information system analyses, and statistical modeling. Primary drivers influencing the spatial heterogeneity of ecosystem service value were identified through geographical detector analysis, and future trends were projected based on historical patterns. The results revealed that (1) ESV showed a clear spatial gradient, with higher values in coastal zones, moderate values along river channels, and lower values inland, and exhibited an overall significant increase over the two decades, primarily driven by improvements in regulating services; (2) wetland area and precipitation were the most influential factors, though socio-economic elements and environmental conditions also contributed to ESV distribution; and (3) future ESV is expected to follow current trends, reinforcing the importance of current management practices. Given that the continuous increase in ESV from 2000 to 2020 was predominantly attributed to water body expansion, future conservation strategies should prioritize the protection and restoration of these water resources.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) remain insufficient to meet global conservation ambitions. We overlaid four biodiversity-prioritization frameworks to map marine conservation priority zones (MCPZs), then intersected them with a published marine-wilderness layer to identify marine ecological expansion zones (MEEZs). The four sources contribute equally to a descriptive agreement score; the wilderness layer indicates low mapped cumulative human impact, not implementation cost. The global mapped MEEZ extent is 10,583,422.69 km². Within the 101 IHO sea areas used for scenario accounting, MEEZs cover 10,576,936.16 km² (2.91% of their summed area), and 16.92% overlaps effective 2026 protected-area (PA) polygons. Adding currently unprotected MEEZs to this PA-only baseline would raise coverage from 9.69% to 9.70%, 9.90%, and 12.11% under conservative, moderate, and ambitious scenarios, respectively. The largest absolute additions occur in the South Pacific, Southern, and North Pacific Seas; the largest within-sea percentage-point gains occur in the Beaufort, Chukchi, and Barents Seas. These candidates are a first-stage spatial screen, not a complete pathway to 30% protection; regional ecological, social, and governance assessment remains necessary.

Understanding the spatial and temporal evolution of ecosystem service values (ESVs) and their underlying drivers is essential for advancing ecological conservation and sustainable management in protected areas. The study area comprises ten national park system pilot areas in China, covering approximately 220,000 km² and encompassing environments ranging from tropical forests to alpine ecosystems. Using 1 km gridded data from the Spatial Distribution Dataset of Terrestrial Ecosystem Service Value in China for five observation years (2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020), we examined ESV dynamics, inter-service relationships, and their associated drivers through Mann–Kendall trend analysis, Spearman correlation analysis, partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), and Geodetector. Spatial trend analysis showed that, from 2000 to 2020, 58% of the total study area exhibited a decreasing ESV trend, 38% showed an increasing trend, and the remaining 4% remained stable; statistically significant decreases and increases accounted for 0.9% and 0.2% of the area, respectively. At the park level, ESVs increased in Three-River Source and Qilian Mountain but declined most markedly in Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park. Positive associations among ecosystem services were more widespread than negative associations, although their spatial patterns differed among parks. Climatic, topographic, and socioeconomic variables showed service-specific associations with the estimated ESVs. Because policy implementation was not directly modeled, the analysis does not isolate the effects of national park designation or specific conservation measures. These findings can provide a national comparative baseline for monitoring ESV dynamics and may inform park-specific ecosystem service-oriented management strategies in China’s national parks.

Gleeok is a family of low latency keyed pseudorandom functions (PRFs) consisting of three parallel SPN based permutations whose outputs are XORed to form the final value. Both Gleeok-128 and Gleeok-256 use a 256 bit key, with block sizes of 128 and 256 bits, respectively. Owing to its multi branch structure, evaluating security margins and mounting effective key recovery attacks present nontrivial challenges. This paper provides the first comprehensive third party cryptanalysis of Gleeok-128. We introduce a two stage MILP based framework for constructing branch wise and full cipher differential linear (DL) distinguishers, together with an integral based key recovery framework tailored to multi branch designs. Our DL analysis yields 7, 7, 8, and 4 round distinguishers for Branch 1, Branch 2, Branch 3, and Gleeok-128, respectively, with squared correlations approximately 2 to the power minus 88.12, 2 to the power minus 88.12, 2 to the power minus 38.73, and 2 to the power minus 49.04, outperforming those in the design document except for the full PRF case. By tightening algebraic degree bounds, we further derive 9, 9, and 7 round integral distinguishers for the three branches and a 7 round distinguisher for the full PRF, extending the designers results by 3, 3, and 2 rounds and by 2 rounds, respectively. These integral properties enable 7 round and 8 round key recovery attacks in the non full codebook and full codebook settings. In addition, we identify a flaw in the original linear security evaluation of Branch 3, showing that it can be distinguished over all 12 rounds with data complexity about 2 to the power 48. We also propose optimized linear layer parameters that significantly improve linear resistance without sacrificing diffusion. Our results advance the understanding of Gleeok-128 and provide general methods for analyzing multi branch symmetric designs.