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Mammals rely on habitat resources for survival and reproduction. We studied microhabitats used by plateau pikas (Ochotona curzoniae) of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Microhabitat features used by pikas include sedge meadows that provide forage, burrows that provide safety from predators and cover for nests, degraded open-dirt patches, and edges between sedge meadow and open dirt patches that often have a “lip” between those microhabitats. We investigated the extent to which these edges might serve as a preferred pika microhabitat. GIS techniques were used to overlay individual pika home ranges, determined by focal and scan sampling, on a digitized map containing microhabitat features. Regions that contained multiple coinciding individual home ranges, referred to as overlap polygons, were categorized numerically based on the number of individual home ranges that overlapped each polygon. These overlap polygons were used as relative measures of pika activity. We tested the spatial relationship between pika activity and the microhabitat features of edges, burrows, and proportional area of sedge. There was a significant relationship between the number of pikas in an overlap polygon and the number of pikas in an adjacent polygon. This pattern was controlled statistically to test whether activity was influenced by the presence of potentially favorable microhabitat features. Most of the variation in number of pikas that overlapped a habitat polygon was associated with the relative amount of “edge microhabitat” between sedge meadow and degraded open dirt patches (Cohen’s effect size, f2 = 0.91). Neither burrow openings nor sedge had a strong influence on the number of pika home ranges that overlapped. The importance of microhabitat edges appeared high for plateau pikas.

Nature not only carefully prepares ingenious raw materials but also continuously inspires and guides human beings to create a wide variety of intelligent materials. As the most abundant mineral resource on earth, clay minerals are no longer synonymous with ceramics and cements. Many natural clay minerals can be exfoliated into single‐ or few‐layered nanosheets with exquisite physicochemical properties, which can be reassembled into functional membranes with a macroscopic controllable size and microscopic ordered structure. They are thus used in many fields including chemistry, biology, energy, and environmental science. Strategic design represents one of the key processes to enhance the value of clay minerals and broaden their applications. In this work, the three frequently used approaches of exfoliation are highlighted and the six routes of assembly including casting, dip‐coating, spray coating, vacuum filtration, electrophoretic deposition, and 3D printing are compared. The corresponding principles and advantages are summarized. Representative applications of clay‐based multifunctional membranes in protection, separation, responsiveness, flexible electronics, and energy conversion are presented. The challenges and future perspectives of the clay‐based multifunctional membranes are discussed.