Cucumber is a high-value horticultural crop, with fruit water content exceeding 90%, and is used for food, processing, and cosmetics, with continuously growing market demand.

Accurate leaf monitoring is essential for smart agriculture because leaves reveal photosynthesis, growth, stress, and disease status. 

Researchers have developed a new way to reconstruct the branching architecture of poplar trees from low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds, turning dense point clouds into detailed branch skeletons and measurable traits. 

The North China Plain (NCP) supports more than 20% of China’s grain output with only 7% of the country’s water resources. The long-established winter wheat–summer maize double cropping system in this region relies heavily on groundwater irrigation, with annual agricultural groundwater withdrawals reaching 2.1×10¹⁰ m³. Wheat irrigation alone accounts for more than 40% of total regional irrigation, and groundwater overexploitation has become a core bottleneck constraining sustainable agricultural development.

Researchers proposed a new machine-learning framework for high-resolution soil organic matter mapping in regions where Mollisol and non-Mollisol soils coexist. By combining remote-sensing-based zoning, feature selection and Random Forest modelling, the approach accounts for spatial heterogeneity while reducing redundant predictors. Applied in Northeast China, the framework achieved 92.13% accuracy in soil zoning and further improved the accuracy and stability of soil organic matter prediction.

Researchers have developed a new remote-sensing method to detect cropland parcel changes without producing complete parcel maps. By comparing the number of edge pixels between images acquired at different times, the method can identify areas where field morphology has been modified due to changes in cropland parcels. Tested across five regions in East Asia, the approach achieved accuracy, precision, recall and F1-scores above 0.85, offering a lightweight tool for monitoring large-scale cropland change.

Recombinant variants represent a substantial proportion (56.82%) of the analyzed NADC34-like PRRSV strains. Twelve consistent recombinant patterns (R1-R12) were defined across 176 NADC34-like whole-genome sequences. Recombination hotspots in Chinese strains shifted from structural genes to ORF1a after 2020. Lineage 1.8 is the primary minor parent driving NADC34-like genetic diversification.