Topical Advisory Panel Member Solicited Papers Series: Land Use Changes in Rural Areas

Dear Colleagues,

Rural landscapes have registered large land use and land cover changes related with economic and agricultural policies, changes in the food systems, technology, demographic losses, or human-nature processes such as land degradation, water scarcity or climate change. The causes and consequences of past and future land use dynamics in rural areas are very different depending on the geographical location and the driving factors that are influencing these changes.

This Special Issue seeks to showcase innovative methodologies using land use change models for investigating and explaining land change dynamics in rural areas and to explore and identify how researchers in different disciplines can learn from one another to develop understanding of rural land use patterns and processes taking place in different geographical areas and the implications these changes may have locally and globally. It will emphasize multidisciplinary dialogue between researchers using land use change models in human and physical geography, hydrology, ecology, economics, agricultural sciences, alternative histories, sociology, and others.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:

• Land change dynamics and patterns in rural landscapes, presenting and visualizing change, multi-scale analysis, comparative techniques, narrative methods, and more.
• Urban-rural interactions and conflicts with focus on their causes and impacts in rural areas, at global, regional and local scales.
• Rural land management and governance linked with land use changes.
• Land use processes such as deforestation, farmland abandonment, urban sprawl in rural areas, agriculture intensification, rewilding, among others, and their driving factors.
• Direct and indirect consequences of land use changes in rural socioecological systems.
• Land use scenarios in rural landscapes related with water scarcity, land degradation, changes in the food systems, depopulation dynamics, multifunctional land use systems, rural development policies, etc.
• Land use modelling advances, including new ways of representing rural trade-offs.
• Innovation of computational, conceptual, analytical, participatory or epistemological advances in land use modeling and its application in rural lands.

Dr. Marta Gallardo
Dr. Julio Fernandez Portela
Dr. David Cocero
Dr. Lara Vilar
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. Land 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.

• land change
• land use modelling
• rural dynamics
• rural spatial planning
• rural land management
• cultural landscapes
• sustainable farming
• sustainable rural development
• depopulation

Title: Changes in land use due to the development of photovoltaic energy in the Region of Murcia (Spain)
Authors: Ramón Martínez-Medina, Encarnación Gil-Meseguer, José María Gómez-Espín
Affiliation: University of Córdoba, University of Murcia (Spain)
Abstract: In recent years, the energy policy of Spain and the European Union has opted for the development of renewable energies, including those of solar origin. Photovoltaics on bodies of water does not entail changes in land use, but that obtained from solar panel modules installed on land does cause changes in the occupation of the territory. The Region of Murcia is located in the southeastern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula, a territory in which more than 3,400 hours of sunshine are recorded per year, places in which the performance of solar energy collection and its transformation into electricity can be more productive, which is why the land occupied by photovoltaic parks has increased at the expense of dryland, irrigated and mountainous rural areas. The high prices of energy have also led to self-consumption measures, with own production on the roofs of industrial warehouses, with floating plates in irrigation reservoirs, with small photovoltaic parks associated with desalination and the impulse-pumping of irrigation by elevation and pressures required by localized irrigation, etc. (Prosional)

Title: Continuity and change in the Ricote Valley Region (South-Eastern Spain): An integrated analysis of socio-demographic, territorial and landscape transformations
Authors: Rubén Giménez-García; Ramón García-Marín; José Molina-Ruiz
Affiliation: University of Murcia
Abstract: Historically, the Ricote Valley Region (Region of Murcia) has based its economic development on a traditional agriculture based on the exploitation of water resources for the cultivation of citrus and fruit trees. Since the middle of the last century, industrial and service development, urban attraction and agricultural policies have generated a multitude of social, population and territorial transformations in this geographical area. The Ricote Valley Region has suffered an unprecedented demographic decline, making it one of the areas with the greatest depopulation problem in SE Spain. The demographic emptying of this region brings with it other associated problems, such as the abandonment of the land and traditional farming systems, with the consequent change in land use. This work aims to analyse both the demographic transition experienced by this murcian region and the changes in land use/land cover generated and the possible relationship between both phenomena. The methodology used to address these objectives is based on the evaluation and GIS processing of information obtained from different official sources (INE, CREM and CLC). The results obtained show an important contrast between the population evolution of the different municipalities that make up the Ricote Valley Region, a notable territorial transformation and a significant correlation between the data obtained for both variables (population evolution and land use transformation).