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Urban Open Space Conservation: Advances, Perspectives and Contribution in Enhancing Urban Sustainability

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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

There is a rising interest in enhancing sustainability in urban and peri-urban contexts through implementing Nature-Based solutions able to increase ecosystem services provisioning and human wellbeing. Accordingly, the availability of open spaces and vacant lands in urban and peri-urban areas represents a challenging planning issue with particular regard to their multifunctionality. Even being currently often neglected by conservation and valorisation programs and investments, these spaces can play a crucial role in i) hampering further land take in urban areas, ii) increasing urban sustainability through enhancing their ecological and functional role, iii) increasing the liveability and wellbeing of inhabitants, iv) balancing possible environmental and social inequality issues within cities. Despite their potential social and ecological role, there is still a limited knowledge in monitoring trends in the availability, characteristics, and functions of open spaces in urban areas as well as on interventions and measures towards their protection, restoration, enhancement, and better inclusion into urban planning. This Special Issue of Forests is intended as a multidisciplinary opportunity to describe innovative approaches for monitoring the past, current and future trends in urban open spaces and to propose planning instruments and interventions able to emphasize their socio-ecological role in strengthening urban green infrastructures. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the development of advanced quantitative and qualitative methods to monitor the abundance, characteristics (e.g., biophysical, management, functional) and trends over time of urban open areas, even related to different urbanization, planning and socio-economic patterns. Case studies on future possible trends of urban open areas under different planning scenarios are also welcome as well as those dealing with innovative approaches for modelling their contributions in terms of biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services provisioning, and ways to strengthen their inclusion into decision-making processes. Manuscripts can cover a wide range of spatial (e.g., from municipality to regional and national) and implications (e.g., planning, governance, policy) scales.

Dr. Lorenzo Sallustio
Prof. Marco Marchetti
Prof. Dr. Bruno Lasserre
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

urban area
urban forest
green infrastructure
vacant land
ecosystem services
urban planning
land cover change
land change monitoring

Published Papers (1 paper)

Research

14 pages, 3216 KiB

Open AccessArticle

RETRACTED: Evaluating the Carrying Capacity and Spatial Pattern Matching of Urban and Rural Construction Land in a Representative City of Middle China

by Zhijun Luo, Yuan Yuan, Song Qi and Jin Xu

Forests 2022, 13(9), 1514; https://doi.org/10.3390/f13091514 - 18 Sep 2022

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1535 | Retraction

Abstract

Evaluation of the carrying capacity and spatial pattern matching of urban–rural construction land is critical for solving problems associated with irrational land use and the destruction of ecosystems. Here, we present a case study exploring the spatial matching relationship between the carrying capacity and current development status of urban–rural construction land in Nanchang, the capital city of Jiangxi Province, China. Land suitability evaluation for urban and rural construction was performed using the analytic hierarchical process and restrictive coefficient method. The spatial matching degree between current construction land and available construction land was obtained by a spatial overlay analysis. Results show that the area most suitable for construction land development (19.2% of the total) is mainly concentrated in the central urban districts, while the relatively suitable area (17.5% of the total) is present around the most suitable area. The ultimate development intensity (i.e., carrying capacity threshold) of construction land in the study region is 41.4%, and the residual development intensity (i.e., development potential) is 24.2%. The available construction land (including most suitable and relatively suitable areas) is generally abundant. The spatial matching degree of construction land ranges from 69.5% to 99.1% in different counties (districts). Pearson’s correlation analysis reveals that the spatial matching degree is positively correlated with the carrying capacity threshold of construction land (r = 0.926; p < 0.01) and the abundance of available construction land (r = 0.732; p < 0.05). The results could be useful for the rational development of urban–rural construction land and the optimization of land space at the city scale. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Open Space Conservation: Advances, Perspectives and Contribution in Enhancing Urban Sustainability)

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