In the context of new type urbanization and rural revitalization, multifunctional transformation provides an important path for rural sustainable development. Multifunctional rural development in turn unfolds a powerful entrée into understanding sustainable rural transformation. Employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches, we documented the study hotpots in rural multifunctionality in this review. Foremost, we systematically examined the definition and change of multifunctionality, and collected and analyzed a total of 1385 publications from both the CNKI and WoS databases with the help of the CiteSpace software. This paper provides a panoramic synthesis of the primary research topics related to rural multifunctionality, summarizing current advancements in evaluation measures, evolutionary processes, driving factors, and interactions among various functions, and ultimately delineating prospective research directions for future studies. Overall, The results reveal that the conceptual connotation of rural multifunctionality has been deepening with the transition of rural development from"productivism" to "post-productivism".The research paradigm has also evolved to emphasize interdisciplinary perspectives and the integration of multi-methodological approaches. Future research should further strengthen the integration of scales in assessing rural multifunctionality, the incorporation of diverse evaluation methods, and promote the expansion of social functions assessment, while conducting comparative studies across various regions involving multi-stakeholders. In particular, by summarizing patterns of multifunctional development and transformation under different developmental paths, researchers can extract the transformation and evolution patterns of various types of rural multifunctionality, as well as substantiating pathways for optimizing rural transformation and revitalization under different dominant functions.

The gender digital divide has become a hot research topic in Western academia, and examining and discussing this topic will help promote the development of relevant research in China. The research process of the gender digital divide can be divided into three stages by analyzing the results from the bibliometric analysis software CiteSpace. The topics of study on the gender digital divide are diverse, involving three perspectives of space, time, and society, covering all fields from the global scale to family space, from school education to career, and from stereotype to social environment. The influencing factors of the gender digital divide mainly include macro social, economic, and policy factors, basic platform guidance, and people's subjective psychological factors. Scholars have made suggestions to address the existing and potential gender digital divide, and some countries and regions have introduced various initiatives, but to be effective, careful scrutiny is needed at the stages of policy formulation and implementation.

In the context of a new technological revolution and the rise of public health awareness, wearable technology has experienced rapid development and widespread adoption, deeply integrating into the practice of urban resident leisure-time physical activities. However, the current theoretical exploration on the spatiotemporal effects and mechanism of residents' activities lags far behind the actual development needs. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this study focused on the comprehensive and systematic theoretical research of geography. The initial step of this study involved a quantitative analysis of the literature using the CiteSpace 5.7 software, providing insights into the general research trend and direction in the field. Then, the study summarized the changes in urban resident leisure-time physical activities under the influence of wearable technology from three perspectives: digital decision making, new spatiotemporal characteristics, and diversified experiences. The research implications underscore the need to deepen the understanding of the decision-making mechanism of resident leisure-time physical activity, strengthen the analysis of complex spatiotemporal rules of leisure-time physical activity, and emphasize research on satisfaction with leisure-time physical activity experiences in multiple situations. Furthermore, the article proposed a research framework for urban resident leisure-time physical activity under the influence of wearable technology. It stressed the importance of the crossover and integration of multidisciplinary theories, with a call to enrich analyses across five dimensions: research subject, technology, activity, space, and time. Additionally, the article argued for innovating research methods, expanding research content, and strengthening the application of health-oriented spatial planning practices. This comprehensive approach may enhance the understanding of the dynamic relationship between wearable technology, urban spaces, and resident leisure-time physical activities, and provide valuable references for urban spatial planning practices guided by residents' activity needs in the digital health era.

Music geography is an interdisciplinary subject between geography, musicology, culture studies, and other disciplines. Compared with the well-established music geography in Western countries, music geography in China is still in the embryonic phase. This study attempted to provide a literature review for the progress of music geography research outside China by having a close look at its origin, development paths, essential debates, frameworks, and approaches, based on an in-depth bibliometric analysis. First, this study found that international research on music geography has extended its scope from the perspective of cultural geography to an interdisciplinary discourse and received great attention from economic geography, political geography, and urban geography. Second, the core themes of international music geography research can be generally classified into five branches: music regions and cultural diffusion, industrial clusters and networks, temporal-spatial phenomena and influences of music performance, music-based identity and cultural politics, and music geography as a special urban soundscape. In terms of theories and approaches, international music geography research can be divided into four main branches: cultural geography, geopolitics, economic geography, and urban geography, which are respectively influenced by the non-representational theory of new cultural geography, popular geopolitics and the relational turn of economic geography, and other important trends. Lastly, this article proposed that there is a great necessity to pay more attention to music research by Chinese geographers as it serves as an ideal case and instrument to inquire into geographical issues such as local identity, authenticity, and sense of place, local-global connections, creative production networks, temporary projects, urban planning, and social well-being.

Urbanization is a necessary stage in the process of economic and social development. The current rapid urbanization has promoted the process of land use transitions, which has further triggered various environmental and economic effects. Conducting the coupling study here is to analyze the interactions between land use, its environmental cost, and its economic output based on the unique perspective of land use transition, as well as to further explore possible ways to achieve both environmental protection and economic development through regulations on land use transition. This article reviewed the important progress of research on land use transition and its environmental and economic effects, explored the concept of land use transition in a multidimensional space, and identified the implications and measurements of coupling. From the frontier of disciplines, the coupling of environmental and economic effects of land use transition is essentially a coupling of human activities and natural processes. How to regulate these relationships through land use transitions is an important content of human-environment research in the new era, as well as a major strategic topic for promoting the new urbanization.

New industrial path development is a classic research topic of Economic Geography. The evolutionary turn provides some novel perspectives for understanding such devleopment. However, the classic theory of Evolutionary Economic Geography mainly focuses on the core areas with superior advantages and successful development experience, and maintains that the development of new industries is based on the specific factors formed by history, thus is unsuitable for explaining the development trajectory of new industries in the peripheries, which are characterized by weak industrial foundation, labor shortage, and low level of knowledge and technology. Therefore, based on the life cycle, windows of locational opportunity (space), and related diversity and unrelated diversity literature, this review summarized the differences and connections between the core and the periphery, and the process of the new industrial path development in the peripheries. The formation of the new industrial path development in the peripheries is jointly affected by industrial heterogeneity, multi-scalar connection, entry method, and agency: 1) Industries characterized by gradual innovation, mature development stage, interactive learning, or special requirements are more likely to develop in the peripheries. 2) The occurrence of such development relies more on the strengthening of multi-scalar interaction and external connection. 3) The entry of such industries often takes the path of transplantation, branching, and extension. 4) The formation and strengthening of new industrial path development often result from the agency of multiple actors. Through identifying and seizing development opportunities, these actors try to match the development requirements of new industries. Finally, this article discussed aspects of future research according to the context of China's transformation period and the core-peripheral relationship.

Seasonal cycle is the crucial intraannual climate pattern to be observed in global and regional agricultural practice. Under global warming, the global surface has witnessed a significant increase in temperature over nearly half a century. As a result, various parameters associated with surface air temperatures, such as the lengths, start dates, and end dates of the four seasons, also changed dramatically. This study examined the following aspects: 1) It summarized the three types of season definition methods, including astronomical, meteorological, and phenological methods; absolute and relative temperature threshold methods; and other methods characterized by regional geographic factors and specific weather phenomena. 2) This study conducted an analysis on the long-term seasonal variation characteristics in the lower-middle reaches of the Yangtze River and the South China region during 1961-2015, using different seasonal division methods based on air temperature and analyzing the characteristics and differences in summer length calculated by different temperature indices. It also reviewed the characteristics of seasonal length changes in historical periods defined by different indicators and the future projected trends, and summarized the key reasons for seasonal length changes. 3) This study evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of each seasonal division method from their fields of application and spatial applicability. Future research is prospected from the possible impact of data bias, the development of a commonly applicable index, and the mechanism of change under climate warming. The results of this study have clarified the differences of seasonal division methods, as well as the characteristics and causes of seasonal changes. This not only is beneficial for guiding agricultural production, but also provides reliable scientific information for addressing the climate change issue.

Since the appearance of the "re-materializing" approach in human geography, the subjectivity of material has been reappraised in the research framework of geography of migration. This reflection helps establishing a new research paradigm that combines mobility and materiality to explain the increasingly complex migration situation in the world. Although the concept of "material turn" first appeared in the literature of social sciences, there is limited research that systematically reviews how geography of migration engages with the materialist approach. Therefore, we intended to examine the current research trends, theoretical debates, and research frontiers in geography of migration, and then construct a theoretical framework that foregrounds the interactive relationship between migration and material. This article first examined the philosophical theory of Western material research, finding that the "material turn" trend was originally rooted in Western materialism, new materialism, and body phenomenology. Second, through the quantitative analysis of the migration-related literature in geography, we found that the research engaging "material turn" in the past 10 years mainly focused on four research hotspots: 1) migration infrastructure; 2) migration material culture; 3) immigrants' bodies, emotion, and politics; and 4) more-than-human migration geography. Focusing on the key research on material theories, this article summarized the current insights in Western and Chinese geography of migration to systematically explain the agency of material during the migration process, which may shed light on the importance of material in mediating the relationship between immigrant and place. Finally, this article constructed a theorical model around the relationship of "migrant-material-place", and further put forward the research prospect of establishing Chinese localized immigration theory. The research on "material turn" not only helps to guide new theoretical trends in geography of migration, but also promotes the place integration of international and intraregional immigrants in China.

Urban-rural population mobility is an important driving force in changing and shaping new urban-rural relations. Along with the deepening of urban-rural integration in China, a new trend of urban-rural population mobility has emerged, namely, the counter-stream of rural-urban migration (urban-rural migration and rural population reflux), an important social phenomenon that is driving the connection and development of rural societies. The evolution and reconstruction of rural social space as a spatial carrier under the interaction between people and industries present new characteristics, and exploring the reconfiguration process of rural social space by counter-stream of rural-urban migration in the context of the complexity of the "people-land-industry" pattern in the Chinese countryside is of great theoretical and practical significance for understanding the dilemmas and opportunities faced by "urban-rural China" at the present time. In this study, we started from the core research fields of urban-rural population mobility and rural reconstruction, rural industrial development and rural social space evolution, and rural social space reconstruction process and effect, and used VOSviewer to explore the related literature in China and internationally, to condense the achievements and bottlenecks that need to be solved in the current research focusing on the theme. This study then looks forward to the theoretical analytical framework, process rules, function mechanism, and place effects of the counter-stream of rural-urban migration in reconstructing the rural social space, aiming to re-conceptualize and re-interpret the phenomenon of the counter-stream of rural-urban migration in China in the new era, to decipher the demographic problems of urban-rural integration and in-depth development, and to provide a scientific basis and support for narrowing the imbalance of urban-rural development and realizing urban-rural co-prosperity.

Innovation is an important driving force for regional development. Since the 1980s, scholars in geography and related disciplines have paid great attention to the relationship between innovation and regional development, and have carried out a wealth of research on regional innovation. In the early stage, regional innovation research took regional innovation system as the main research approach and explored the spatial aggregation mechanism and regional characteristics of innovation activities. In the 21st century, however, with the deepening of economic globalization and the prominence of global challenges in the fields of climate, environment, and energy, regional innovation research has shown a diversified trend in theory and research objects. Although scholars have theoretically reviewed regional innovation research, they have not paid sufficient attention to the changes in the socioeconomic background and theories of regional innovation research. To fill this gap, this article comprehensively comprehended the socioeconomic background, research propositions, and main research topics of regional innovation research paradigm change since the 1980s, revealing the evolution of regional innovation research that shifted from closed to open region precondition and from static to dynamic and transformative analysis, indicating the contribution of other perspectives such as technological innovation system, evolutionary economic geography, and transition studies, and suggesting the importance of global knowledge and the normative turn in regional innovation research. Moreover, after summarizing the current progress, this article proposed that future regional innovation research needs to pay more attention to multi-scalar and comparative regional innovation research and focus on the negative side and the role of the state in regional innovation activities.

Amidst economic globalization, commerce and trade have become increasingly interwoven with national security and foreign policy, emphasizing the growing interdependence of commerce, trade, and foreign policy in the 21st century. This trend has intensified in the 21st century, with the rise of multipolar economies and growing trade and technology conflicts, particularly between China and the United States, fueling interest in geoeconomic research. However, geoeconomic studies still lack clear theoretical and conceptual definitions as well as a complete qualitative analytical framework, posing challenges in supporting China's peaceful rise with a theoretical perspective. This study reviewed the current landscape of Western geoeconomic research, uncovering that: 1) the theoretical development of Western geoeconomics has evolved through two phases: germination and initiation; 2) three predominant schools have emerged: geostrategy, economic geography, and critical geography; 3) geoeconomics and geopolitics are deeply intertwined, rooted in "capitalistic logic" and "territorial logic", respectively; 4) extant empirical research spans various topics, including geoeconomic strategies, the application and impact of geoeconomic tools, and the discourse and conceptualization of geoeconomics. Finally, this article pointed out that geoeconomics is a tangible reality and represents a form of political geography driven by capitalistic logic, focusing on geopolitical spatial economics. It is dialectically integrated with geopolitics, serving both as a diplomatic policy practice and an analytical framework. Based on the coupling of existing research and China's contemporary context, this article suggests that future research in China should address geoeconomic resilience, the implementation and effectiveness of geoeconomic tools at varying scales, geoeconomic practices in smaller countries and third countries, geoeconomics from the perspective of urban regionalism, and the interplay between geoeconomic discourses and practices, to advance geoeconomic theories in China. This research is helpful to accurately and comprehensively understanding geoeconomics, grasping the development trends of Western geoeconomics, and better guiding the development of geoeconomics in China, so as to serve the implementation of "the Belt and rRoad Initiative" and the peaceful rise of China.

The global development of the Internet and mobile communication technology has greatly expanded individuals' access to and occupation of space and social resources. In the interaction and integration of cyberspace and real space, cyberspace has been interpreted in geographical and sociological dimensions, and the conceptual connotation has shifted from technology to space, society, and media. New technologies create new problems. Geographers have discussed the impact of the Internet and other information technologies on individual activities, urban space, and social development. However, there is still a lack of research on geographical concepts and geographic characteristics in cyberspace, which has become an obstacle to the development of geography of cyberspace. This study focused on the research of cyberspace in the field of social geography, used bibliometric methods to identify the research hotspots of scholars in China and internationally in the field of cyberspace geography in different periods, examined the development of cyberspace and its social-spatial attribute construction process, and based on the perspective of virtual-real hybrid space, summarized the progress of the social geographical research on cyberspace from the aspects of line decay, media space and virtual representation. This review aims to enhance understanding and exploration of geographic phenomena and social issues in cyberspace, and to advance the field of cyberspace geography.

In the context of the digital age, the emergence of information and communication technology (ICT) provides a new space for children's growth. This study collected a total of 89 publications in English related to ICT and children's geography through the Web of Science (WoS) SSCI collection and Google Scholar, and summarized the research connotation of ICT. From a technical perspective, this article summarized the technological changes of ICT in children's daily lives and its research applications in children's geography. By constructing a framework of review of globalization-localization at the macro level, public space-learning space-home space at the meso level, and personal identity construction at the micro level, the relevant research on ICT and children's groups was interpreted from a geographical perspective. Finally, by breaking the independent and closed binary intergenerational boundary in previous studies on children and introducing new debates on real-virtual and private-public, this review broadens research ideas from a new perspective. It also points out that the ways to guide the underage group to fully integrate into the digitalization background in daily life, creatively use digital tools, and view the relationship between themselves and technology in a healthy manner will become a new focus of children's research in the Chinese context, and calls for attention from the academia and social sectors on the development of children in the digital age.

Through the exploration of positivism, structuralism, and humanism, the methodology of modern human geography research gradually became systematic and complete. This study, based on the Chinese and international literature on rural settlement landscape and renowned geography scholars' arguments, and referring to the modern human geography philosophical thoughts and their derivative methodology and epistemology, concluded that under the guidance of positivism, structuralism, and humanism, the schools of rural settlement landscape studies followed the renewal path of "tradition-criticism-integration-transcendence". Furthermore, the positivism geography mainly underlines spatiality and regionality, which is summarized as spatialized description of order characteristics; The humanism geography is knee to rediscover the place and symbolic meaning of rural settlement landscapes, with diversified people-oriented humanistic care; The structuralism geography pays more attention to the power and social relationships behind the landscape, and its causality interpretation of the power game. In general, the relevant achievements of research of geographical schools on rural settlement landscape are more microscopic than macroscopic, more static than dynamic, and more material space oriented than socioeconomic space oriented, which have their own strengths and weaknesses in guiding the practice of rural revitalization in China. In the future, a Chinese paradigm of rural settlement landscape research with Chinese characteristics should be created from the perspective of human geography methodology, focusing on the settlement landscapes of different types of rural areas to strengthen the deficiencies of various research paradigms, and develop towards the theoretical integration of positivism, humanism, and structuralism to promote rural revitalization from the perspective of geography.

Since the 1980s, the study of systems of cities has seen two major breakthroughs, that is, the shift from the national scale to the global scale, and the shift from the central place theory to a network perspective. Starting in the late 1990s, world/global city research began to merge with the network perspective, resulting in a growing interest in the study of world city networks. World city network (WCN) research uses a network perspective to study cross-border inter-city relations on the global scale. A considerable amount of theoretical and empirical research on world city networks has emerged over the past two decades. The purpose of this article was to critically review recent advances and the main limitations of theories and methods underpinning current world city network research. The article outlined the global context that gives rise to the fundamental restructuring of world city systems. The essential tenets of the main theories pertaining to world city network research were then discussed, including the hierarchy of world cities, world city hypothesis, global city, and "space of flows". The specifications, key assumptions, and applications of the interlocking network model (INM) were presented, followed by a discussion of several social network analysis (SNA) tools commonly used in world city network research. Finally, the article discussed the limitations of existing theories and methodology and, on that basis, highlighted several areas that deserve further research.

High tide flooding (HTF)—a kind of minor coastal flooding that usually occurs near the high tide level, becomes more frequent under climate change. It has a certain impact on the coastal socioeconomic system and natural environment, and is a hot issue in low-lying coastal cities. This article examined the definition of HTF, and systematically summarized the main progress of HTF research in terms of its drivers, impacts, risk assessment, and frequency forecasting. In the future, it is recommended to strengthen the research on the drivers, risk assessment, and forecast of HTF frequency. These include extensive monitoring of HTF, quantifying the role of interactions between factors leading to HTF, comprehensively assessing HTF risk, and accurately predicting HTF frequency. All these works will finally contribute to the disaster prevention and mitigation of HTF in coastal cities.

Analyzing the relationship and interaction between economic activities and the environment is a necessary way to achieve human-environment harmony. Environmental economic geography (EEG) emerged at the historic moment, mainly studying the impact of environmental factors on economic activities, as well as the feedback, adaptation, and transformation of economic activities to natural conditions. This article first reviewed the evolution of the discipline of EEG, constructed a research framework from the perspective of economic cycle, and found that EEG research revealed a transition from the focus on external development to the internalization of costs. Through a bibliometric analysis of Chinese and international economic-environmental literature from 1996 to 2023, the article summarized key stages in the development of EEG research, including the initial period, the construction period, and the rapid development period. Combining global value chains and material flow theory, the study analyzed the globalization, relational, institutionalization and evolutionary turn of EEG research topics. In the future, EEG research will be helpful to addressing ecological environmental governance, green innovation and industrial transformation, energy, resilience, and sustainability problems.

The utilization of the resources and environment and the impact on the Earth system of modern human activities have been undergoing great changes. The environment and sustainable development of human society are facing severe challenges. The study of human-earth system coupling provides integrated approaches for solving ecological and socioeconomic problems. However, the understanding of the rural human-earth system coupling is insufficient. Therefore, reviewing the progress of research on rural human-earth system coupling is of great significance for promoting the development of human-earth system science and supporting the decision making for coordinated and sustainable development. The results of this study show that rural human-earth system coupling is a comprehensive process of interaction and mutual influence between the rural socioeconomic system and the natural ecosystem, forming a theoretical paradigm of "process-mechanism-pattern-effect-regulation". The research themes mainly include five aspects, namely, the process and pattern of rural natural and social elements coupling, the influence and feedback of climate change on agricultural production, the driving mechanism of urbanization on rural development, the telecoupling effect of globalization and agricultural trade, and the regulation effects of policy intervention and engineering measures. The research methods mainly involve the coupling evaluation models and the coupling mechanism models. Given the insufficient research on the mutual feedback and transmission mechanisms of rural human-earth system coupling at multiple scales and the lack of data models, future studies should focus on detecting the coupling process and pattern of rural human-earth system under structure transformation and scale extension, analyzing the coupling mechanism of rural human-earth system under elements flow and effects cascade, exploring the simulation and decision-making methods of rural human-earth system that are data-driven and characterized by model integration, and finding the coordination pathways of rural human-earth system under the objective of harmony between humans and nature and global sustainable development.

In recent years, trade protectionism, anti-globalization ideology, and the global public health crisis have exacerbated the challenges of globalization. In this process, tourism development has been greatly impacted and undergone major changes, which faces strong needs for reconstruction and transformation and requires us to re-examine the opportunities and challenges. Therefore, based on the macro-meso-micro scale analyses, this study systematically reviewed and summarized the relevant topics of tourism research in recent years from the perspective of glocalization using the bibliographic analysis method. First, with the increasingly frequent global crises in recent years, scholars have focused on the most pressing practical issues, examined the interaction between climate change and global-local tourism development, the interaction between the COVID-19 pandemic and global-local tourism development, and the glocalization strategy of tourism response to the crises. It is also an important research topic to analyze the dialectical relationship between the Belt and Road initiative and tourism, the development of inbound tourism and outbound tourism in countries and regions along the routes, and the paths of international tourism cooperation between countries and regions along the routes. Second, there exist significant differences in the development factors, development processes, development models, and mechanisms of glocalized tourism in different regions. Urban tourism, rural tourism, nature reserve tourism, and heritage site tourism are the main types of regional tourism in the study of tourism research from the perspective of glocalization. Third, attention has been paid to the research of glocalization and tourism at the micro scale of local governments, residents, tourism enterprises, and tourists. Based on the above, we discussed the tourism research direction from the perspective of glocalization: continue to build theoretical systems of tourism research from the perspective of glocalization, broaden and deepen tourism research at different scales and the correlation between scales from the perspective of glocalization, and use the comprehensive and integrated method from qualitative to quantitative to provide a theoretical reference and practical basis for tourism research with the glocalization perspective.

Improving the carbon sequestration and sink capacity of terrestrial ecosystems is one of the most economical and green ways to achieve the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals on schedule. Soil particulate organic carbon (POC) and mineral-associated organic carbon (MAOC), as important soil organic carbon fractions, are the key to understanding changes in the carbon cycle in terrestrial ecosystems. Previous studies have shown that climate warming has changed the carbon cycle of terrestrial ecosystems and affected the input of organic carbon from plants and microorganisms at the same time, but there is no unified conclusion on the response of soil organic carbon components to climate warming and their controlling factors. This article systematically introduced the framework of soil particulate and mineral-associated organic matter. The formation, transformation, and stabilization of the two components were described. The article reviewed current research progresses on the response of soil particulate and mineral-associated organic carbon to climate warming and their influencing factors. On this basis, the shortcomings of existing research and future challenges were discussed, and the key scientific issues that need to be solved urgently at present and future research directions were proposed, in order to provide a theoretical reference for the formulation of soil organic carbon management and solutions to climate change.