Lingzhan Miao

Solar‐driven interfacial evaporation technology offers a groundbreaking approach to water treatment. However, the relentless pursuit of high energy efficiency has encountered a bottleneck in vapor generation, necessitating consideration of vapor diffusion. To tackle these limitations, this work establishes a comprehensive liquid‐liquid‐vapor transport kinetics framework, which couples water transport, vapor generation, vapor diffusion, and thermal management. This system optimizes water transport while minimizing thermal losses by tailoring the pore architecture. More importantly, we design dedicated convection windows for activating internal self‐generation convection to accelerate vapor dissipation. This system delivered a superior evaporation rate of 4.93 kg m ⁻² h ⁻¹ , exceeding the conventional designs (2.9 kg m ⁻² h ⁻¹ ) while achieving energy efficiency of 89.6% (considering both environmental heat gain and convective heat gain). This enhancement stems from the efficient vapor generation and release process, driven by the synergistic interplay of water transport, thermal management, and convection control. Outdoor experiments demonstrate that the optimized array system achieves a water production rate of approximately 1.95 kg m ⁻² h ⁻¹ without any detectable contamination. This illustrates that this strategy can be used for maximizing the performance of 3D evaporators.

In recent decades, rapid socioeconomic development and population growth have led to the degradation of river and lake health worldwide, posing severe challenges to watershed ecological management. The growing intensity of land-use has significantly contributed to the accelerated deterioration of aquatic ecosystems. River and lake health assessment has evolved from single-parameter metrics (e.g., water quality) to multidimensional frameworks integrating hydrological, biological, and anthropogenic factors. This research conducted a bibliometric analysis of 1302 publications from 1996 to 2023 in the Web of Science database to identify research trends and hotspots. Results showed that publications exhibited a three-phase growth incubation (1996–2000), expansion (2001–2012), and acceleration (2013–2023), with the U.S., China, and Australia as leading contributors characterized by regionally clustered international collaborations. Research themes have shifted from single water quality parameters to integrated assessments. “Land-use”, “water quality”, and “biotic integrity” have emerged as core hotspots, forming a synergistic assessment framework that combines physicochemical, biological, and socioeconomic factors. The research scale underwent a spatial refinement process from the whole watershed to the buffer zone of rivers and lakes, and land-use effects on aquatic ecosystems vary significantly across spatial scales (entire watershed and riparian zones). Fine-scale studies better capture localized pollution pathways, supporting targeted conservation strategies. This review systematically outlines research status, hotspots, and development directions for river and lake health studies, highlighting the need for integrated watershed management, emphasizing conservation through fine-scale land-use monitoring, and providing scientific support for integrated refined governance of watershed ecology.

Increased drying of rivers under global climate change is leading to biodiversity loss. However, it is not clear whether biodiversity loss affects river functions. In this study, we investigated the changes in biofilm community diversity and functions in an artificial stream after different drying durations. A critical drying duration of around 60 days was found in the microbial composition and functions. Therefore, different drying durations can be divided into short-term drying (~0–20 days) and long-term drying (~60–130 days) to analyse the effect of biodiversity in terms of ecosystem functions. In summary, the dominant relationship of biodiversity on community stability got uncoupled after long-term drying. Community assembly became dominant in maintaining multifunctionality with increasing drying duration rather than biodiversity as traditionally perceived. This study reveals the importance of community assembly, extending theoretical knowledge of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality.

Drying is threatening global river ecosystems due to climate change, altering community composition and function even upon flow resumption. This mesocosm study investigated the greenhouse gas emissions fluxes and underlying mechanisms from benthic habitats prone to 20–100 days of drying. Results show that CO2 and N2O emissions from biofilms did not increase when drying increased, due to the changes in functional communities and genes. Notable is the transformation of biofilm from carbon source to sink following prolonged drying (mean emission fluxes ranged from 804.78 to −305.55 mg m2 h2). This was mainly due to strong increases in the abundance of genes involved in the Calvin–Benson–Bassham cycle (2.82 × 10−5 to 7.12 × 10−5), and functional taxa such as gemmatimonadota and pseudomonadota. These findings reveal a potential mitigation effect of drying on greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and streams, which could be relevant in the face of climate change.