Land doi: 10.3390/land15112184

Authors: Lingyu Lian Xu Lu Manman Guo Shan Huang

Ecological restoration screening based on aggregate ecosystem service supply may overlook differences in service composition and neighboring functional contexts. This study examined how ecosystem service bundle (ESB) dynamics and spatial organization inform differentiated restoration screening. Habitat quality, carbon storage, soil conservation, and water yield were assessed in the Sanjiangyuan region for five years between 2000 and 2020. K-means clustering identified three ESBs: integrated low-supply bundle (B1), low water yield–ecological maintenance bundle (B2), and water yield dominant–soil conservation sensitive bundle (B3). Patch–node and theoretical breakpoint analyses characterized spatial organization, while proximity-based screening independently identified ecological restoration candidate areas. B1 expanded by 1669 km2, whereas B2 contracted by 41,870 km2 and B3 expanded by 40,201 km2. B1–B2 candidate areas decreased by 2028 km2, while B1–B3 candidate areas increased from 909 to 4538 km2. Candidate-area distributions remained highly consistent across tested neighborhood distance thresholds. These findings suggest that changes in ecosystem service combinations reflect the reorganization of landscape multifunctionality rather than uniform ecological improvement or deterioration. Ecological restoration screening should therefore consider both local service composition and neighboring functional contexts, as similar levels of service supply can occur within different functional settings.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112183

Authors: Kecan Fan Aixin Dai Tong Zhao Xiaoxi Hu Weimin Zheng Han Liang

Land-cover assessments need spatial supports that connect administrative decisions with watershed processes. We evaluated how county-intersection, local sub-basin and upstream exposures change finite county review lists and their water-quality evidence. Three land-cover states and 84 monthly reporting periods supported comparisons in the Xiangjiang basin and a separate 23-county Yuanjiang population. Among 59 Xiangjiang candidates, changing county to upstream support replaced five or six of twelve selected counties, compared with zero to two replacements between 2019 and 2024 within a definition. With 48 observed counties fixed, frozen 2019 impervious rules selected 2025 category-III-or-worse frequencies of 35.28% and 39.94% at K = 10, against a 15.75% candidate mean. Yuanjiang frequencies at K = 5 were 5.25% and 4.31%, against 5.20%. Under all-record source fitting, upstream augmentation reduced error relative to county-only models, with combined-model target rank correlations of 0.056–0.379; removing coordinates did not yield the lowest absolute error. Recent water history provided a strong local reference. Monitoring composition altered individual county changes by up to 31.67 percentage points. Spatial support therefore changes review membership, while screening, prediction accuracy and county ranking require distinct evaluation. County outputs link land-cover context, recent observations and targeted evidence review for GIS-based environmental assessment and cross-boundary coordination.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112181

Authors: Padma Sundar Maharjan Shuang Zhao Roland Chih-Hung Lin Tao Xu Jie Bai Miao Wang

This study examines how minor cultural heritage can function as a spatial resource for heritage-informed land-use planning in historic settlements. Using the traditional water heritage structure jaḥruṃhiti in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, as an empirical case, it investigates spatial, socio-cultural and infrastructural relationships. Through a mixed-methods approach combining historical inscriptions, field documentation, and GIS-based spatial analysis, the study documented 476 jaḥruṃhiti across 52 settlements, yielding 92 historical inscriptions (530 to 1936 AD). A focused case study in Patan identified 162 jaḥruṃhiti, of which 45.06% remain functionally active. Spatial analysis revealed a highly clustered network (Average Nearest Neighbour ratio = 0.616, Z = −9.35, p < 0.001) that heavily intersects with ceremonial and major walking routes. Though sites near major temples were more likely to be inactive (logistic regression, p = 0.028), implicating functional decline, the traditional guthi trust system sustains the socio-cultural and ritual continuity. The study conceptualises jaḥruṃhiti as a networked spatial heritage resource rather than an isolated object. The key planning implication is the shift from monument-centric protection to a relational, multi-scalar framework. Municipal land-use authorities need to designate ceremonial routes as heritage corridors, integrating historic water networks into a wider HUL approach that values local minor heritage. This approach bridges the gap between national monument laws and local regulations, offering a replicable model for integrating heritage into sustainable urban planning.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112182

Authors: EeHung Khew Tetsuya Aikoh Hajime Matsushima

Pre-designation stakeholder spatial perceptions remain underexamined despite their relevance to protected area (PA) designation. Using Public Participation Geographical Information System (PPGIS), by convenience sampling, 97 participants (69 locals and 25 visitors) mapped 377 open-ended values and concerns statements across existing PA (EPA), candidate PA (CPA), and outside CPA (OCPA) in eastern Hokkaido, Japan. Inductive coding yielded 1042 code instances organized into 122 codes, 17 sub-themes, and four themes. Gi* hotspot values (n = 719) and concerns (n = 323) were compared to identify value–concern zones, and a participant-based location quotient identified distinctive themes. Values (69%) concentrated on ecology, landscape, recreation, and conservation; concerns concentrated on energy infrastructure, ecological loss, human–wildlife conflicts, and facilities. Potential conflict zones (overlapping value and concern hotspots) were concentrated on the Notsuke Peninsula and Shunkunitai within the EPA, combining shared values with habitat loss. Concern-dominant zones, marked by energy infrastructure and habitat loss, lay mainly outside the EPA. Locals and visitors shared values but differed in concerns; only locals raised human–wildlife conflicts. Codes related to all six elements of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services conceptual framework, though abiotic elements fell outside its contribution categories. Pre-designation PPGIS provides spatial evidence for boundary delimitation, zoning, and identifying potential conflicts.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112180

Authors: Francesca Palomba Costantino Crupi Anna Chiesura Francesco Cavedon Mariangela Soraci Filippo D’Ascola Stefano Leboroni Antonio Scaramella Giandomenico Allegri Giacinto Ciappetta Silvia Brini Alessandro Di Menno di Bucchianico Raffaela Gaddi

To measure access to public Urban Green and Blue Spaces (UGBS) at a high level of spatial detail, this paper develops an integrated methodology combining high-resolution building-level population distribution, network routing models and localized environmental data. Accessibility to UGBS is defined according to the World Health Organization (WHO) indicator, which measures accessibility as the proportion of inhabitants living within 300 metres of a green area of at least 0.5 hectares. The methodology identifies residential buildings and distributes population among them using an area-weighted dasymetric mapping approach. These procedures were performed in a GIS environment and preliminarily applied to the case study of Casalecchio di Reno, Italy. The framework relies on official administrative datasets, complemented by satellite imagery for identifying public UGBS. Implementing the framework within a WebGIS platform could facilitate access, visualisation, and cross-referencing while supporting data sharing and collaboration with local administrations to validate, refine, and update UGBS layers and related access points through editing functionalities. Future developments will focus on improving the accuracy of accessibility and building-level population estimates by refining building and UGBS access information, incorporating building height information and integrating additional spatial indicators such as tree canopy cover.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112179

Authors: Jeongmin Kim Amarpreet Singh Arora Birte Meller Wenang Anurogo Emilien Gohaud Thorsten Schuetze

Urban heatwaves are intensifying under climate change, yet the relationships between urban morphological and environmental factors and land surface temperature (LST) remain insufficiently understood at fine spatial scales. Coarse thermal resolution and administrative or grid-based units can obscure building-level heterogeneity. An integrated analytical framework was proposed to identify microscale spatial heterogeneity and local reversals in urban factor–LST relationships. Landsat-derived LST was downscaled to 10 m using Sentinel-2 imagery, while building-centered tessellations representing building and road configurations served as spatial units. Two- and three-dimensional indicators of albedo, sky view factor, green and road environments, building density, and building scale were integrated into latent variables using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Latent variable scores were subsequently analyzed using multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR). Application to Jung-gu and Seo-gu in Daegu, South Korea, revealed positive and negative local relationships with LST for most factors. Albedo-related results differed between variable representations, with the underlying cause remaining unresolved, and the estimated spatial scale of the Albedo Environment (AE)–LST relationship was sensitive to MGWR estimation settings. Based on openly available data and general morphological indicators, the framework provides a transferable basis for locally tailored heat-mitigation strategies.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112178

Authors: Jiahao Chen Chuandi Fang Penghong Cheng Cheng Zhan Jinhua Cheng Jiahui Yi

The sustainable development of resource-based cities (RBCs) has been a focal point for both governmental policies and academic research. Recent evidence reveals a striking divergence in growth across Chinese RBCs, raising a core question: Why do some RBCs experience prolonged decline while others sustain long-term growth? This study aims to determine whether, and under what conditions, resource dependence acts as a curse rather than a blessing and to derive stage-specific sustainable development pathways. On the basis of a panel dataset of 115 prefecture-level RBCs in China covering 2000–2020, we combine two-way fixed effects estimation with an XGBoost–SHAP analytical framework to explore the drivers of growth divergence. Three key findings emerge. First, the resource curse is conditional. Resource dependence has an inverted U-shaped effect on economic growth, and this effect differs systematically across growing, mature, declining, and regenerative cities. Second, total factor productivity is the primary predictor of growth, accounting for 55.2% of the total explanatory power, whereas the digital economy, financial development, manufacturing scale, geographic location, and resource dependence each contribute only 5–8.4%. Third, the economic growth of resource-based cities is jointly shaped by the nonlinear moderating effects of multiple factors. When the marginal contribution of the digital economy changes from positive to negative beyond a critical threshold, financial development exhibits an inverted U-shaped pattern, and manufacturing scale maintains an approximately linear positive effect. These findings provide empirical guidance for designing stage specific, differentiated sustainable development strategies.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112176

Authors: Gabriel Kuczman Attila Tóth Bronislava Poljak Lamrichová

Plane trees (Platanus sp.) are distinctive non-native elements of European historic gardens and parks, valued for their monumental dimensions, longevity, and compositional significance. However, their spatial and compositional roles within historic designed landscapes remain insufficiently documented. This study investigates these roles across 16 historic manor gardens and landscape parks in southwestern Slovakia, comprising 111 documented plane trees. Field surveys, dendrometric measurements, historical cartographic research, and spatial and landscape-compositional analyses were combined to assess tree groupings, geometric arrangements, and relationships with principal landscape elements. Based on the empirical findings, a classification framework comprising 15 categories of spatial and compositional relationships, including geometric planting arrangements, was developed. Solitary specimens predominated, accounting for 74.60% of documented grouping occurrences, while relationships with principal compositional axes (75% of parks), circulation routes (68.75%), and important views and vistas (56.25%) were particularly frequent. Formal geometric arrangements, including circular and semicircular groupings, were comparatively rare. The findings demonstrate that plane trees contribute to historic landscape compositions not only as monumental individual specimens but also through their integration into wider spatial structures. The proposed evidence-based classification provides a methodological foundation for further comparative research and supports the conservation and restoration of historic designed landscapes.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112175

Authors: Hang Ren Zhubang Wang Jingyi Zhang Mo Bi

Development corridors are widely promoted as instruments of African regional integration and urban transformation, yet whether planned corridors actually become observable growth corridors remains rarely tested at the continental scale. Without imposing a predefined corridor list, we identify linear growth corridors across 50 African countries from 2010–2020 built-up expansion and 2012–2020 nighttime-light change using spatial clustering and spatial autocorrelation, compare them with policy corridors, and estimate grid- and corridor-level association models to examine the factors behind corridor emergence. The results characterize the spatial patterns of 82 main corridors and 320 sub-corridors: high-growth cells are strongly transport-aligned, with a median distance to the main transport network of 0.90 km versus 5.34 km for background cells; roads carry continuous growth, whereas railways form a station-centered secondary axis. Policy corridors cover 14.6% of land cells and capture 43.3% of built-up growth and 61.5% of light growth within 25 km, but main-corridor length overlap is only 42.4%, including both planned-but-weakly-grown and grown-but-unplanned mismatches. The results show that corridor emergence is shaped mainly by continuous road accessibility, inherited settlement, port and airport gateways, and security conditions. Policy corridors should therefore be treated as potential directions, with resources prioritized for secondary-road and gateway connections in weak-correspondence corridors rather than extending line extents.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112177

Authors: Gerontidis Stylianos Soulis Konstantinos Stavropoulos Alexandros Palli-Gravani Stergia Kalivas Dionissios Nikitakis Evangelos

Agri-environmental policies increasingly rely on spatial indicators and model-derived metrics calculated from harmonized soil datasets, yet disagreement in the underlying soil information can propagate differently depending on the mathematical structure and decision rule of the derived output. This study develops a policy-oriented spatial evaluation framework for assessing dataset-induced soil-data uncertainty at the level of selected agri-environmental indicators and model-derived metrics, together with their potential policy interpretation, using Greece as a national-scale case study. Two agri-environmental indicators (the MEDALUS ESAI Soil Quality Index (SQI) and SOC/Clay ratio) and two model-derived metrics (the RUSLE soil-erodibility factor K and SCS Curve Number (CN)) were evaluated using selected JRC/ESDAC soil products, ISRIC SoilGrids, and an integrated Greek field-based reference dataset. Output-specific complete paired samples ranged from N = 12,049 for SQI to N = 16,573 for CN, with N = 15,066 for RUSLE K and N = 15,005 for SOC/Clay. The framework combined output-specific paired statistics with decision-relevant disagreement definitions, local spatial-clustering diagnostics, and terrain stratification. Results were strongly output-dependent. SQI showed high overall agreement, with overall accuracy of about 91% for both international datasets, but class-specific performance was substantially weaker for the highest-risk Class 3: Producer’s Accuracy was only about 54%, indicating that approximately 46% of Greek-reference Class 3 locations were assigned to lower-risk classes by the international datasets. RUSLE K was more sensitive: under the primary study-defined ±10% criterion, overestimation affected 80.76% of ESDAC and 62.86% of ISRIC locations, and this ordering persisted across the ±5% to ±15% sensitivity range. For SOC/Clay, threshold-crossing cases in which the Greek reference was at or below 1/13 but the international estimate was above 1/13 (“false-healthy” cases) occurred in 22.81% of ESDAC and 13.50% of ISRIC comparisons. CN had similar national central tendencies among datasets, yet policy-relevant underestimation affected approximately 34% of ESDAC and 27% of ISRIC locations. Terrain stratification revealed a clear SOC/Clay pattern: false-healthy threshold-crossing cases increased from 20.69% to 32.33% for ESDAC and from 10.49% to 26.20% for ISRIC between the <6% and 18–35% slope classes. Policy-relevant soil-data uncertainty was therefore not equivalent to numerical disagreement, and its propagation was strongly output-dependent. The SOC/Clay false-healthy result provides a clear example: a numerically higher estimate can produce a lower apparent policy concern. International gridded soil products remain valuable for broad-scale screening, but their fitness for purpose should be evaluated at the level of the derived output and the decision context in which it is used.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112174

Authors: Yi Wang Tiantian Peng Yufeng Lu Rourou Xing Zemin Zhang Qiuming Wang Meng Liu Xiao Guan

Assessments of sandy grassland restoration often rely on aboveground vegetation, but how germinable soil seed banks recover at different depths remains unclear. We examined a restoration chronosequence in the Hulunbuir Sandy Land, China, including unrestored sandy land, sites restored for 12, 14, 16, and 18 years, and natural grassland. Surveys of 300 sampling points in 2024 included vegetation inventories, seedling-emergence assays for the 0–2 and 2–10 cm soil layers, and soil physicochemical analyses. We applied partial Mantel tests and structural equation modeling and used null models to examine community assembly. Vegetation cover, species richness, and Shannon diversity generally rose with restoration, while soil total nitrogen and organic carbon increased and bulk density declined. Diversity was consistently greater in the surface seed bank and followed aboveground vegetation more closely; diversity in the deep seed bank remained low, suggesting slower recovery. Seed-bank density and the proportion of surface seeds were positively associated with soil chemical conditions and vegetation cover. Ecological drift dominated assembly, with homogeneous selection more apparent in early restoration and the deep layer. These findings suggest coupled but asynchronous recovery aboveground and belowground and support including seed banks at different depths and soil conditions in restoration assessments.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112173

Authors: Guodong Lin Bo Feng Lu Zhang

Holistically considering the systemic function of multi-dimensional factors and accurately identifying core elements within black soil conservation are essential for dynamically adjusting conservation strategies and consolidating the foundation of national food security. This study innovatively adapts Hayami’s social development model for the domain of black soil conservation and employs the revised model as its macro-analytical framework. Based on 224 qualitative textual documents collected from four typical pilot counties in Northeast China during 2022–2024, this study adopts a grounded theory approach to unpack micro-level interaction mechanisms in black soil conservation practices. The results demonstrate that black soil conservation constitutes a complex comprehensive system covering technology, talent, institutions, resources, and industry, which shows high consistency with the logic of the social development model. The talent–technology subsystem acts as a critical bridging hub connecting the institutional and the resource–industry subsystems and undertakes core driving functions in conservation practice. Five core interactive influencing mechanisms are identified: technology supply, multi-stakeholder co-governance, institutional normalization, resource allocation, and industrial integration. This study reveals the socioeconomic interaction process of black soil conservation and provides differentiated empirical references for formulating locally adapted governance strategies for pilot areas and similar black soil regions.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112172

Authors: Xiaoqiang Zhang Fuming Xie Yueming Hu Lu Wang Yuejiao Ji Boqun Li Yangsong Pu Qicai Xie

Whole-Region Comprehensive Land Consolidation (WRCLC) faces persistent evaluation bottlenecks in practice: traditional quantitative monitoring captures physical land-cover changes but fails to interpret cross-sectoral policy semantics, whereas manual administrative review suffers from high operational costs, subjective inconsistency, and severe information asymmetry. To address these challenges, this study develops a domain-adapted Large Language Model (LLM) framework for structured preliminary effectiveness assessment of WRCLC, using Guangdong Province as a case study. Following the standardization and integration of multi-source heterogeneous data across county-level units, a domain-specific model is established using a knowledge distillation framework based on a hard-constraint mechanism combined with LoRA fine-tuning. A six-dimensional evaluation system is established to evaluate project progress, factor endowment guarantee, structural optimization, value realization, bottom-line constraints, and regional characteristics. Qualitative and quantitative validation across typical county-level administrative divisions in Guangdong demonstrates high alignment with expert judgment and robust capabilities in contextual narrative generation. Rather than replacing administrative decision-making or expert review, this framework demonstrates the feasibility of generative artificial intelligence as an auxiliary decision-support tool. Operating within a human-in-the-loop governance paradigm, the proposed approach effectively bridges quantitative spatial metrics and qualitative governance semantics, significantly reducing administrative drafting burdens while enhancing process monitoring, compliance review, and adaptive land governance.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112171

Authors: Qili Li Siqi Yang Jie Liu Ruiqi Pan Jiawei Gao Liang Zhao

Assessing ecological changes along transport corridors is essential for protecting landscape integrity and ecosystem services, especially in ecologically fragile areas, yet integrated comparisons across geomorphic settings in this fragile alpine region remain limited. This study examined landscape patterns, carbon sequestration, and habitat quality in the basin–mountain transition and plateau–valley sections of a railway corridor extending from the western Sichuan Basin to the southern Qinghai–Tibet Plateau from 2017 to 2024. We found the following main findings: (1) The basin–mountain transition section showed declining patch density and landscape diversity, with reductions of approximately 43% and 12% within 5 km, compared with 38% and 8% within 10 km. In contrast, largest-patch dominance increased in the plateau–valley section at both scales. (2) Construction-period changes were more pronounced in the basin–mountain transition section, where the lowest landscape-division class increased from 52.71% to 60.01%, whereas spatial patterns remained relatively stable in the plateau–valley section. (3) Declining carbon sequestration and habitat quality occupied 14.25% and 12.31% of the basin–mountain transition section, compared with 4.42% and 3.91% of the plateau–valley section. Both services increased approximately linearly with distance in the former but peaked at approximately 7–9 km in the latter. (4) Habitat quality was positively associated with precipitation and negatively with temperature overall. The temporal trend became more positive with distance from the corridor, and temperature associations turned positive beyond approximately 8 km in the plateau–valley section. These findings support differentiated monitoring and management of transport corridors in alpine and ecologically fragile regions.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112170

Authors: Zongli Song Yao Zhang Yang Ma Dapeng Su Yuantao Liao Zhicheng Wang Zhiqiang Kang Yizhong Sui Guangming Zhao

Mangrove sediments represent vital reservoirs for carbon storage in coastal wetland ecosystems, and characterizing their organic carbon stocks and sources is critical for elucidating carbon cycling dynamics and accurately quantifying blue carbon sinks strength. However, spatial heterogeneity of sediment organic carbon stocks and their sources across tidal elevations within estuarine mangroves remains limited. Sediment cores (100 cm in length) were retrieved across high, middle, and low tidal flats in the Nanliu River Estuary, southwestern China. Integrating geochemical proxies including total organic carbon, total nitrogen, C/N ratios, stable carbon isotopes, and lignin phenols, with a three-end-member mixing model and Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations, we revealed the spatial differentiation characteristics of sediment organic carbon stocks and their sources across tidal elevations. The results showed that sediment organic carbon stocks in the high and middle tidal flats (143.40 and 148.65 Mg C ha−1, respectively) were significantly higher than that in the low-tidal flat (74.24 Mg C ha−1), which was attributed to the thriving mangrove vegetation in the high and middle tidal zones compared to its sparse distribution in the low tidal zone. Across all three tidal flats, the influence of mangrove litterfall and root systems diminishes with depth, leading to an overall vertical decline in carbon stocks. Sediment organic carbon is consistently dominated by Terrestrial organic carbon across all three tidal flats, reflecting substantial allochthonous inputs delivered by estuarine runoff. In terms of vertical variations, mangrove-derived organic carbon driven by seaward tidal flat progradation and mangrove colonization expansion, in the high and middle tidal flats exhibits a high in shallow layers and low in deep layers pattern. The intensities of hydrodynamics and mangrove vegetation on the low tidal flat are irregular, and both terrigenous and marine organic carbon exhibit a multi-stage variation pattern. Overall, coastal blue carbon assessments must integrate tidal elevation-driven spatial distribution characteristics to reduce sink evaluation uncertainties.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112169

Authors: Humberto Reyes-Hernández Michelle Farfán Francisco Javier Sahagún-Sánchez Carlos Alfonso Muñoz-Robles Raul A. Vaca Genuit Omar Parra-Rodríguez

Land surface temperature (LST) and land use/land cover changes (LUCC) are linked to global environmental change. This study analyzes the spatiotemporal dynamics of LUCC and LST and their relationship, and generates a spatially explicit trend projection of LST to 2040 in the Huasteca and Media regions, San Luis Potosí, Mexico. LST data were acquired using a semi-automated procedure on the Google Earth Engine platform. Spatial and temporal LUCC analysis and trend-based LST modeling were conducted using GIS and cellular automata. Urban areas are expanding at a rate of 0.65% per year, while forests are declining at a rate of 0.15% annually. The highest LST values were detected in shrubland, agricultural land and urban areas, whereas forests and wetlands exhibited the lowest LST. The main drivers of transitions toward warmer LST classes were land use and land cover, soil type, canopy height and topographic conditions. Model projections indicate that the two highest LST categories could expand from 26% of the study area in 2023 to approximately 37% by 2040, primarily in the Media region. Due to the regional differences, mitigation strategies should prioritize conserving forests and secondary vegetation in the Huasteca region and management of shrubland and rain-fed agricultural land in the Media region.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112168

Authors: Inês Adagói Maria João Canadas Selma B. Pena

Common lands in rural Portugal face a combination of challenges from demographic decline, limited active management, and increasing wildfire risk, particularly in more marginalized areas. This study analyses local perceptions of landscape transformation in the common lands of Fajão-Vidual parish (in Pampilhosa da Serra, central Portugal), which cover over 50% of the parish’s total area and where the gradual dissolution of Commoners’ Committees transferred the management responsibility to the Parish Council. Based on semi-structured interviews with key management agents (three sessions, four contributors) and a participatory workshop with local residents and stakeholders (n = 16), we examine how different actors perceive current land use dynamics, governance arrangements, and desirable landscape futures. Results show convergence among the participating actors around preferences for multifunctional landscapes and native-species-based landscape mosaics, a rejection of invasive species expansion, and strongly argued divergent positions on the solar energy landscape. However, structural barriers—including labor scarcity, cadastral disputes, and administrative complexity—significantly constrain landscape transformation. We argue that the future of common lands is fundamentally a socio-political question, requiring governance renewal, structural reform, and long-term policy continuity.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112167

Authors: Cong Yu Jia Song Xiaotong Mao Zhen Wang Linke Hou

Withdrawal from rural homesteads (WRH) is of great significance for promoting sustainable utilization of rural land resources and inclusive rural development in transitional China. However, existing studies have largely overlooked endogenous factors embedded in rural communities, limiting a comprehensive understanding of WRH. To bridge this gap, this paper attempts to elucidate the role of new rural elites (NREs), individuals possessing relatively advantageous political, economic, or knowledge-based resources within rural communities, in households’ WRH responses. Drawing on the China Land Economic Survey, covering 1927 rural households across 52 villages in Jiangsu Province, we examine the association between NRE density and households’ WRH responses, assess the statistical pathways involving non-agricultural employment and social stability, and further explore whether collective capacity conditions this association. The findings indicate that higher NRE density is associated with more positive household responses to WRH, with positive associations observed for political, economic, and intellectual elites. The association also shows different patterns across livelihood strategies, geographic conditions, and governance contexts. Meanwhile, the KHB decomposition shows that the indirect components associated with non-agricultural employment and social stability account for 15.40% and 18.11% of the total association, respectively. Furthermore, collective capacity appears to have a positive moderating role in the association between NRE density and households’ WRH responses. This study further provides policy implications for the sustainable utilization of rural land resources and serves as a theoretical reference for similar local initiatives in developing countries.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112165

Authors: Yanran Tian Jiarong Hou Tongde Chen Boxin Zeng Bo Yang

Climate change may alter the coupling between farmland soil erosion and soil carbon cycling, yet the evolution of research themes and the net carbon consequences of erosion remain unclear. We combined bibliometric analysis with a critical literature synthesis of 653 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (1993–2025), using CiteSpace and VOSviewer, with keyword analyses focusing on 2016–2025. Publication output increased after 2010, particularly since 2020. Eight keyword clusters were identified, encompassing land-use change, soil organic carbon, soil erosion, nitrous oxide, remote sensing, climate change mitigation, soil hydrology, and carbon emissions. Keyword bursts for “stabilization” and “productivity” persisted through 2025. The literature synthesis suggests that extreme rainfall, drought–rainfall sequences, and freeze–thaw processes can modify erosion thresholds and sediment connectivity, influencing the selective transport and redistribution of soil organic carbon. Eroded carbon may be buried and stabilized or re-exposed and mineralized; thus, local carbon losses or depositional gains do not necessarily indicate net carbon emissions or sequestration. Divergent findings partly reflect differences in accounting boundaries, observation periods, carbon fractions, and methodological approaches. We propose a conceptual framework linking climate-driven erosion, carbon redistribution, stabilization–mineralization processes, and agricultural management feedbacks. Future research should integrate event-scale observations, source-to-sink carbon budgets, greenhouse gas assessments, and crop productivity to validate these proposed linkages.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112166

Authors: Andrés Caballero-Calvo Yolanda Jiménez Olivencia Juan Jiménez-Caldera

Understanding landscape change in protected mountain areas requires integrating the observation of visible transformations with the social meanings attached to them. The Sierra Nevada Natural Area (Spain), characterised by exceptional biophysical diversity and a long history of human occupation, provides an ideal setting for investigating these interactions. This study evaluates the scientific contribution of the Sierra Nevada Landscape Observatory (OPSiN) after ten years of operation, assessing the potential of repeat photography combined with spatial analysis and public participation to improve the understanding of long-term landscape dynamics. The observatory is based on a network of 145 permanently georeferenced observation points supported by standardised photographic protocols, historical image archives, fieldwork, and participatory processes involving local stakeholders and protected-area managers. Diachronic photographic interpretation enabled the identification of major landscape transformations, including agricultural abandonment, natural vegetation expansion, forest densification, agricultural intensification, tourism-related development and climate-related changes. Comparison between visual evidence and stakeholder perceptions revealed both strong convergences, particularly regarding agricultural abandonment and the deterioration of traditional cultural landscapes, and productive tensions concerning forest expansion, tourism and agricultural intensification, highlighting the complementary nature of scientific observation and local knowledge. The results suggest that repeat photography is particularly useful for documenting gradual socio-ecological transformations that may be difficult to detect with other monitoring approaches. However, photographic evidence alone is insufficient to fully explain landscape dynamics, reinforcing the need to integrate visual monitoring with participatory interpretation and complementary sources of environmental information. The study illustrates how landscape observatories can move beyond documentary functions, and their potential to support adaptive landscape governance, environmental planning and long-term monitoring in protected mountain regions.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112163

Authors: Cen Guo Yushun Piao

The Koguryo kingdom (traditional founding 37 BCE–668 CE) built a broad system of fortified settlements across northeastern Asia’s mountainous regions. Yet, the environmental determinants of their locations remain underexplored in quantitative terms. This study applies GIS-based terrain analysis and a Monte Carlo null model to 41 verified Koguryo fortified sites. The results reveal a corridor-mediated distribution shaped by terrain: 90.2% of sites lie on slopes ≥ 10° and 65.9% within 1 km of a perennial river, while 66.8% of site pairs are separated by >100 km, a statistic that partly reflects the broad study region; the dual-scale nearest-neighbor analysis and the KDE–river coincidence support terrain-mediated dispersal along valley corridors. An intervisibility null-model analysis finds minimal mutual visibility (3 reciprocal pairs, 0.37%; 23 one-way pairs, 2.80%), not significantly different from random resampling within the terrain envelope (N = 999, p = 0.419), a result consistent with visibility not having been a primary locational factor. Historical records of construction-technique transmission are qualitatively consistent with inter-polity exchange, although this dimension is not quantified here. The study offers a transferable methodology linking terrain characterization with a visual null model, advancing landscape-archaeological understanding of settlement–environment interaction.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112164

Authors: Hiruni P. Deraniyagala Mahesh Dhamsara Gayathra Bandara Naveen Ranasinghe Lahiru Gamage Iddamalgoda Jayawardanage Judi U. N. Perera Bellanthudage Kushan A. Bellanthudawa Semini Kushara Nawalage Nawalamudiyanselaya Supun M. Pawuluwage Chamalka de Silva Dasun T. Senanayaka Samitha Udayanga Thilina D. Surasinghe

Although urbanization can improve human well-being, it also can pose threats to biodiversity, particularly in urban freshwater ecosystems of tropical regions where rapid land development often outpaces sustainable land management. However, the capacity of urban systems, such as urban wetland parks, to maintain biodiversity under accelerating anthropogenic pressures and urban expansion remains relatively less understood. Therefore, we investigated odonate diversity and community structure in two urban wetland parks (Diyasaru Park (DP) and Weli Park (WP)) that differ in habitat structure and anthropogenic disturbance, examining how diversity and community composition respond to habitat characteristics and human pressures. At both parks, Brachythemis contaminata was the most abundant odonate taxon, followed by Rhyothemis variegata. Although the urban wetland park with the least anthropogenic disturbances, DP, exhibited slightly higher species richness, none of the diversity metrics (richness, Shannon, and evenness indices) differed significantly between parks. Community composition analyses did not reveal distinct differences between urban wetland parks, even though the park with the most anthropogenic disturbances showed greater community variability. The odonate composition in DP showed that the majority (83.3%, 20 species) was classified as Least Concern under national conservation status, while a similar result was observed in WP (86.4%, 19 species). Resident species dominated the odonate assemblages at both sites, comprising 91.7% (22 species) at DP and 86.4% (19 species) at WP. Despite clear contrasts in human disturbance and habitat structure, both urban wetland parks supported similar odonate diversity, suggesting that odonate alpha diversity can remain resistant to disturbance in urban wetlands. We emphasize the need for biodiversity monitoring in urban wetland parks, especially in tropical cities of the Global South, which can inform wetland management and urban green-space planning.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112161

Authors: Dongrong Yu Shikai Li Shuxia Liu Shufang Li Qingsong Duan Chuan Zhang

Cropland transition involves not only changes in land quantity but also spatial restructuring and shifts in vegetation functioning. Taking Luliang County, China, as a case study, this study integrated multi-temporal land-use data from 1980 to 2020 with normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), soil, topographic, hydrological, climatic, and socioeconomic datasets. Cropland structure was characterized by quantity, configuration, and cropland–built-up land adjacency intensity (CAI). A generalized additive model (GAM) was used to construct a resource–environment baseline for expected cropland NDVI, while spatial block cross-validation was used to derive out-of-sample functional deviations. Lag-augmented models and models augmented with historical structural information were further applied to assess temporal dependence, and generalized additive mixed models were used to examine nonlinear structure–function relationships under different development pressures. From 1980 to 2020, cropland area declined by only 2.70%, whereas fragmentation, boundary complexity, and cropland–built-up land adjacency generally increased, indicating substantial internal restructuring. Although observed NDVI partially recovered after 2010, the point estimate of mean environment-adjusted NDVI deviation decreased, and negative-deviation states persisted between sampled years. Both antecedent and historical cropland structures provided additional predictive information beyond contemporary structure and improved out-of-block prediction across spatial scales. Nonlinear models outperformed linear specifications, and the fitted CAI–NDVI deviation relationship declined at high adjacency intensity under the population-density conditions examined, with a candidate structural range of approximately 5.1–5.4 km km−2 at the 1 km analytical scale. These findings indicate that cropland vulnerability cannot be adequately assessed from area change or absolute vegetation greenness alone, and highlight the importance of integrating spatial restructuring, environmental expectations, temporal structural information, and population-conditioned interface associations.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112162

Authors: Mohamed E. Fadl Wessam R. Zahra Ahmed S. Elnagar Elsherbiny A. Ali Marios Drosos Antonio Scopa Doaa M. Abou El-Fadl

Egypt’s New Delta mega-project represents the largest horizontal agricultural expansion in modern Egyptian history, creating an urgent need for cost-effective land-cover and crop monitoring systems capable of operating under hyper-arid conditions. This study evaluates the operational feasibility of machine learning (ML)-based land-cover and crop classification using multi-temporal Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery in the El-Daba Development Corridor, Egypt, a hyper-arid component of newly irrigated desert land. Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected (GRD) data (vertical-vertical (VV) and vertical-horizontal (VH) polarizations) acquired from January to December 2025 were processed within Google Earth Engine (GEE). Monthly composite images were generated to capture phenological development, from which backscatter features, polarization ratios and differences, statistical descriptors, the Radar Vegetation Index (RVI), and Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) texture features were extracted. K-Means clustering (K = 10) provided an initial stratification of the feature space, while Random Forest (RF) classification was trained on 840 samples (70%) and validated on 358 independent samples (30%). Temporal backscatter analysis revealed distinct phenological signatures: wheat and sugar beet peaked in March (VV = −7 dB), maize reached maximum backscatter in July (VH = −12 dB, RVI = 0.70), and perennial crops maintained stable signatures year-round. Feature importance analysis identified VH in July (8.7%), VV in March (7.9%), and RVI in July (7.2%) as the most discriminative variables, confirming that combining observations from multiple phenological periods substantially enhances crop separability. The RF classifier achieved 90.5% overall accuracy with a Kappa coefficient of 0.895, with per-class accuracies ranging from 77.8% (vegetables) to 100% (non-agricultural classes). Optimal discrimination windows were identified as February-March for winter cereals, June-July for summer maize, and January/May-June for potato. These results demonstrate that SAR-only land-cover and crop mapping can deliver operationally useful accuracy in hyper-arid environments where optical imagery is constrained, providing a scalable foundation for agricultural monitoring in Egypt’s desert reclamation frontiers and comparable arid systems globally.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112160

Authors: Ana Luiza Melo Santos Ricardo Santos Silva Amorim Demetrius David da Silva Frederico Carlos Martins de Menezes Filho Michel Castro Moreira Clívia Dias Coelho

Growing demand for food requires expanding and intensifying agriculture while maintaining environmental and economic sustainability. This study mapped agricultural potential—the relative, crop-independent capacity of land to support rainfed agricultural use (crops, pastures, and planted forests)—in the Paraopeba River Basin, Brazil, using GIS-based multicriteria decision analysis. Land-use capability, simplified climatic water balance, agricultural production value per hectare, and distance to roads were rescaled with linear fuzzy functions and combined by a weighted linear combination using Analytic Hierarchy Process weights (56.5%, 26.2%, 11.8%, and 5.5%, respectively; consistency ratio = 4.3%). Low (26.4%) and high (27.2%) potential predominated. High-potential areas were concentrated in the Lower Paraopeba and on the left bank, whereas low-potential areas predominated in the Upper Paraopeba and on the right bank, mainly driven by land-use capability. In a Monte Carlo analysis of the AHP judgments, priority areas retained their class in 92% of simulations. Because land use was used to build the economic criterion, the agreement with current agriculture is descriptive rather than an independent validation; a scenario without this criterion discriminated agricultural land from natural vegetation with an area under the curve of 0.63. The framework supports regional planning, but high potential does not justify converting native vegetation.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112159

Authors: Jianrui Zhang Xuhong Yang Yinhui Zhou Yayi Zhang

Driven by the construction of a unified national market and the rural revitalization strategy, the performance of rural property rights transfer and transaction markets has become a key issue in improving the allocation efficiency of rural factors. From the perspective of transaction cost theory, this study interprets such markets as government-led institutional platforms that convert institutional supply into market functions by reducing information search, bargaining and contracting, supervision and enforcement, dispute governance, and financing conversion costs. On this basis, an input–output evaluation system is constructed with land transfer disputes incorporated as an undesirable output. Using panel data for 29 Chinese provinces from 2021 to 2023, the study applies the SBM-DEA model and the Malmquist productivity index to evaluate static efficiency, compare recorded inputs and outputs, examine dynamic productivity change, and identify provincial development types. The results show that (1) the mean static efficiency score is 0.4996, indicating that overall efficiency remains below the frontier and exhibits a slight increase in 2022 followed by a decline in 2023. Spatially, the distribution presents a heterogeneous pattern, with frontier and non-frontier markets distributed across eastern, central, western, and northeastern China. (2) Input–output comparisons reveal differentiated provincial performance: Zhejiang recorded increased fiscal subsidies alongside declining financing output, while Hainan exhibited a substantial difference between online platform inputs and recorded transaction and financing outputs. (3) The mean total factor productivity index is 0.925, with the technical change index (1.256) exceeding the efficiency change index (0.737), and the TFP index increasing from 0.719 in 2021–2022 to 1.190 in 2022–2023. (4) Based on the two-dimensional relationship between technical change and efficiency change, provincial markets can be classified into Dual-Engine Driven, Technology-Led, Decline-Warning, and Management-Recovery types, comprising 9, 12, 2, and 6 provinces, respectively. The findings suggest that the transformation of rural property rights transfer and transaction markets should move from scale-oriented expansion toward improved transaction services, more effective resource allocation, strengthened financing linkages, and better dispute information management.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112158

Authors: Jing Liu Chao Chen Bing Tian Weiyi Xu

Under rapid urbanization and intensive land development, understanding the spatiotemporal patterns of cultivated land fragmentation (CLF) and its associations with cultivated land multifunctional utilization (CLMU) in economically developed regions is important for optimizing cultivated land use patterns, improving multifunctional cultivated land governance, and safeguarding regional food and ecological security. Based on multi-source data on land use, agricultural production, and socioeconomic conditions, this study uses ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models to examine year-specific associations between CLF and CLMU and their spatial variation in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), a typical economically developed region in China. The results show that: (1) From 2000 to 2020, CLF in the YRD increased by 13.52%. Its dimensional attributes followed the order of spatial aggregation > shape regularity > resource scale, and all three dimensions declined by 9.59%, 4.30%, and 8.39%, respectively. Spatially, 94.87% of counties in the YRD showed an increase in CLF, and counties with large increases in CLF were mainly concentrated in northern Zhejiang, northern Anhui, and the northern and eastern coastal plains of Jiangsu. (2) During 2000–2020, the level of CLMU in the YRD declined slightly. Specifically, the ecological maintenance and economic support functions increased by 8.99% and 2.26%, respectively, whereas the agricultural production and social security functions decreased by 7.48% and 16.14%, respectively. Spatially, approximately 52.82% of counties showed a decline in CLMU, mainly in northern Anhui, Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Zhejiang. Counties with an increased CLMU were mainly distributed in central and southern Anhui, with increases mostly exceeding 7.4%. (3) CLF was consistently negatively correlated with CLMU during the study period, and the magnitude of this negative association varied across the five observation years. Spatially, the association between CLF and CLMU was generally negative in the north and positive in the south. The associations of CLF and different cultivated land landscape characteristics with agricultural production, economic support, social security, and ecological maintenance functions also showed significant spatio-temporal heterogeneity.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112157

Authors: Pablo González-Albornoz María Isabel López Clemente Rubio-Manzano

Social actors play a key role in urban heritage conservation by shaping decisions, conflicts, and territorial transformations. However, their incorporation into spatial modelling remains limited. This study evaluates whether spatialised social actor presence provides additional explanatory and predictive information for land-use change modelling in Bellavista, Tomé, Chile. The workflow combines Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO)-based variable selection followed by an unpenalised binomial Generalised Linear Model (GLM) for interpretation, Random Forest for prediction, and Cellular Automata for spatial simulation, with predictive performance assessed through spatial cross-validation. The contribution of the social dimension was evaluated by comparing models with and without social actor presence variables under spatial cross-validation. The results show modest but consistent improvements in spatial predictive performance when social variables are incorporated. Social actor presence showed transition-specific effects: Companies and Academia were significantly associated with the Historic-to-New transition, whereas no individual social variable was significant for the Historic Open Space-to-New transition. Nevertheless, incorporating social variables consistently improved Random Forest performance under spatial cross-validation in both transitions. The retrospective simulation reproduced the main observed patterns of change, while the 2030 scenario indicates a substantial reduction in historic open spaces.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112154

Authors: Jianhua Xiao Yingkui Luan Qilin Tan Xiaojie Han Zhaoshan Cai Yucheng Meng Yanxin Mao Zhengyi Yao

Large-scale renewable energy development in China’s desert areas faces windblown sand hazards and ecological constraints. This narrative review examines the ecological effects of wind and photovoltaic (PV) projects and the role of sand control in protecting infrastructure. Wind farms primarily alter airflow and turbulent mixing, whereas PV arrays redistribute radiation and rainfall and occupy more continuous ground surfaces. Soil moisture and vegetation responses to PV development vary with climate, soil properties, panel position and management. Increased vegetation cover alone does not establish ecosystem recovery or sustainable water use. We develop a management framework linking site conditions and dominant risks to sand control measures, water constraints and monitoring indicators. Comparisons of Kubuqi, Tengger, Gonghe and Ulan Buh summarize reported practices and identify evidence gaps and constraints on their transfer. Mechanical barriers and native vegetation can be combined where local water budgets permit, while intact desert surfaces should be protected from unnecessary disturbance. The overlap between renewable energy bases and the Northern Sand Control Belt makes coordinated planning relevant to both energy and ecological security. Long-term comparisons with pre-construction conditions and undeveloped reference sites are needed to evaluate these benefits.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112156

Authors: Mingqi Yang Xinru Wang Li He Xingyue Du Xin Zhang Kaiyuan Yi

Soundscapes contribute to human well-being, yet the combined effects of spatiotemporal dynamics, landscape patterns and vegetation on acoustic perception remain insufficiently understood. This study investigated Yueyatan Park (16 ha) using 20 sample points categorized by blue, blue–green and green landscapes in street-side or inner-park locations. Over two weekdays and two rest days, A-weighted sound pressure level (SPL) was measured (5 × 2 min, energy-averaged), ISO 12913 soundwalk evaluations were conducted (960 valid responses) and plant diversity was surveyed. Results showed that rest-day SPL exceeded weekday levels, peaking 14:00–18:00, with blue–green and street-side sites loudest. Perception decoupled from SPL: water sound and birdsong enhanced ISO-P (Pleasantness) and ISO-E (Eventfulness), while traffic noise reduced ISO-P. Mediation analysis indicated that elevated SPL suppressed natural sounds and amplified traffic noise. Three-way ANOVA confirmed significant effects of time, pattern and location on ISO-P, with key Pattern × Time interactions. Plant diversity exhibited non-linear effects; overall richness sometimes lowered ISO-P via recreational noise, whereas shrub and tree richness buffered temporal fluctuations in perception. Within this single-park, non-probability sample, results suggest that soundscape quality depends more on source semantics than absolute noise levels. An eco-acoustic coupling framework integrating vegetation structure, landscape pattern and time-sensitive management may inform to optimise urban park soundscapes.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112155

Authors: Tianzi Li Yifan Shi

Three organisational arrangements dominate the transfer of contracted land management rights in rural China: village collectives, enterprises and large farming households. Using the 2020 China Rural Revitalization Survey (191 villages, 2325 households), we classify each village by the operator holding the largest share of transferred area, estimate censored Tobit, ordinary least squares and logit models with village-clustered standard errors, and grade every result by whether it survives two-part models, matching and doubly robust estimators. Four findings are robust: enterprise-dominated villages record land rents about 217 yuan per mu and year above collective-dominated villages and more written contracts, and their households are about five percentage points less likely to be very satisfied with income, as are households under large-household dominance, by a smaller margin. Land productivity, farm scale, labour allocation and collective assets do not differ, and the satisfaction gap is spread across the village rather than concentrated among households that leased land out. We read the pattern as a difference in how the value of land is divided rather than in how much it yields.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112153

Authors: Dean Kyne Bridget R. Scanlon Yiming Zhang Keri K. Stephens Brent Porter Wonhyun Lee Aracelli V. Vega

Tract-level poverty and income can guide screening, but their correspondence with colonia needs remains unclear. This study linked 2018–2022 American Community Survey estimates and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development income benchmarks to records for 1266 colonias in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. Spatial analyses examined clustering, and group comparisons accounted for shared census tracts and multiple testing. Study-derived low-income status applied to approximately 81% of tracts with valid classifications, compared with 45% statewide. Among colonias, approximately 75% were in tracts with poverty rates of at least 20%. All four economic indicators clustered regionally, but no High–High-poverty cluster remained significant after false-discovery-rate correction. Economic indicators did not differ significantly across public health classifications, and recorded colonia conditions showed no consistent poverty gradient. Wastewater collection differed across poverty categories, but the association was nonsignificant after adjustment for county, public health classification, population, and acreage. Sample coverage and model-fit concerns limit this finding. The colonia database was last comprehensively updated in 2014, so recorded conditions may differ from current needs. Findings support a two-stage planning approach: use economic maps to identify areas for review, then verify infrastructure and service needs locally before selecting projects.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112152

Authors: Wei Nie Qiu Wu Gang Li Jing Liu Quanjun Li Jie Xu

Rural waterfront landscapes connect ecological environments with residents’ recreational experiences, and assessing their perceived restorativeness can support improvements in rural living environments. However, complex terrain and limited data availability constrain the quantitative assessment of their visual characteristics. This study examined the Changjiang River waterfront in Jinzhai County, Anhui Province, China. Panoramic imagery, semantic segmentation, and random forest regression were integrated to derive 12 objective visual indicators of landscape composition and color characteristics and to predict four dimensions of perceived restorativeness: fascination, being away, coherence, and scope. The R2 values for the hold-out test set were 0.732, 0.730, 0.722, and 0.719, respectively (n = 200). The green view index, blue view index, contrast, color count, and color complexity showed significant positive correlations with perceived restorativeness, whereas the road visibility index, mountain visual ratio, and artificial structure visibility index showed significant negative correlations. Visible blue-green elements and visual richness were associated with higher perceived-restorativeness scores, whereas images with more visually dominant road surfaces, mountains, and artificial structures tended to receive lower perceived-restorativeness scores. These findings are specific to the dry-season, low-water-level conditions observed during the November survey and should not be generalized to other seasons or hydrological conditions.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112151

Authors: Yuze Tian Qi Ding Yuzhou Wang Yantao Yang Yuanzheng Lin

Streets are important settings for healthy city development, and Healthy Streets evaluation provides an objective basis for identifying street problems and guiding street improvement. However, existing studies often separate Healthy Streets evaluation from streetscape perception analysis, making it difficult to translate evaluation results into systematic street renewal decisions. To address this gap, this study develops a street renewal decision framework that integrates Healthy Streets evaluation, streetscape perception, and explainable machine learning. A localized Healthy Streets evaluation system comprising 10 Primary Indicators and 22 Secondary Indicators is applied to 1510 streets in the central urban districts of Beijing. Streetscape perceptions are then predicted using a pretrained model based on Place Pulse 2.0, with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) applied to the machine learning models to identify perceptually important Healthy Streets indicators. By integrating street environment evidence with streetscape perception evidence, the framework further supports the identification of Indicator Update Priorities, Street Renewal Types, and Street Implementation Priority. The results show that (1) Healthy Streets performance was generally better in northern and core areas, while environmental shortfalls and unfavorable predicted perceptions overlapped in southern Fengtai and southeastern Chaoyang, concentrating renewal needs; (2) “Effective Walking Width” emerged as a major shortfall, while “Effective Walking Width,” “Large Vehicle Traffic Interaction,” and “Street Greenery” were the indicators with the highest overall SHAP contributions across streetscape perception dimensions; and (3) by integrating objective environmental shortfalls and streetscape perception problems, the framework classifies streets into four renewal types and proposes differentiated strategies: space reallocation for Priority Renewal, spatial and facility improvements for Shortfall Improvement, parking management and greening for Perceptual Enhancement, and routine maintenance for Maintenance Optimization. This study provides a reference framework for Healthy Streets evaluation, street renewal prioritization, and implementation planning.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112150

Authors: Evangelia Balla Jaap Zevenbergen

Across Europe, digital transformation is reshaping planning systems and development control, where planning rules and building standards are operationalized in practice. This article examines how digital permitting systems, as part of wider regulatory infrastructures, mediate rather than simply automate development control processes. The study adopts a qualitative comparative case-study approach, examining Greece and the Netherlands as contrasting institutional settings. Conceptually, the study builds on planning scholarship on development control and is informed by perspectives on regulation and socio-technical infrastructures. The empirical analysis draws on legislation, administrative and policy documents, judicial decisions, professional and technical material, and limited practitioner confirmation. The Greek e-Adeies system and the Dutch Digitaal Stelsel Omgevingswet (DSO) are examined along three dimensions: institutional embedding; allocation of authority and permissibility control; and responsibility, accountability, and legal oversight. The comparison reveals two distinct configurations of digital development control. In Greece, e-Adeies combines automatic permit issuance with a redistribution of prior control, increased reliance on professional inputs, and post-issuance oversight mechanisms. In the Netherlands, the DSO integrates rules, information, and application procedures across multiple levels of government while substantive decision-making remains with competent authorities. The central finding is that digital integration can centralize access to regulatory information and procedures without necessarily centralizing substantive decision-making authority or altering its formal allocation. Digital permitting systems do not simply reflect existing planning-system characteristics. They interact with legal and institutional arrangements to shape how regulatory information, control functions, responsibilities, and oversight are organized.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112149

Authors: Tongxin Wang Hailiang Xu Mao Ye Xiaodong Xie Guankui Gao Jia Wang Xinglong Li

Soil salinization is a major constraint on ecological restoration in arid regions. This study was conducted in the highly saline coal-mining area of Dananhu, Hami, Xinjiang, China. Using a spatial chronosequence approach, we compared soil salt distribution between unplanted bare land and plots planted for 1, 2, and 3 years, as well as ion composition in the roots, stems, and leaves of three halophyte species. The results showed that: (1) Soil salt contents were lower in planted plots than in unplanted bare land. Surface-soil salinity and the sodium adsorption ratio (SAR) differed among plots with different planting durations, with higher values in the 2-year plots than in the 1- and 3-year plots. (2) Na+, SO42−, and Cl− were the dominant soil ions, and their relative proportions differed among plots, particularly in the surface soil. (3) The roots of Tamarix chinensis had a relatively high proportion of SO42−, whereas the leaves of Nitraria tangutorum had relatively high proportions of Na+ and Cl−. In contrast, the leaves of Phragmites australis had a relatively low proportion of Na+ and relatively high proportions of K+ and Ca2+. (4) Root Na+ contents in T. chinensis and P. australis were significantly positively correlated with SAR in the upper soil layer, whereas stem Na+ content in N. tangutorum was significantly negatively correlated with soil Cl−, Na+, and SAR. These findings highlight differences in soil ionic conditions and plant ion traits among plots with different planting durations.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112148

Authors: Anne Gharaibeh Wolfram Höfer

Rain-gardens are widely promoted as nature-based solutions (NbSs) within blue-green infrastructure (BGI), yet their contribution to broader resilience objectives raises questions about how localized projects are governed, maintained, and connected to watershed planning. This study investigates these relationships through an interpretive qualitative case study in New Jersey, USA, integrating seven semi-structured interview sessions with ten professional stakeholders, ten professional lectures, technical and regulatory documents, and field documentation of 18 site records comprising 24 rain-gardens. Dunnett and Clayden (2007) served as a separate landscape-design comparator. Stormwater management emerged as the principal implementation rationale, while ecological, educational, and public-space objectives were generally complementary. Field observations revealed differences in vegetation establishment, apparent upkeep, and physical condition. Across stakeholder accounts, maintenance responsibility, funding, continuity of personnel and institutional knowledge, technical expertise, and interorganizational coordination emerged as interdependent capacities, synthesized as stewardship’s invisible infrastructure. A central planning tension concerned the delivery of discrete site-scale projects despite broader watershed and climate-resilience ambitions. New Jersey guidance and watershed-organized initiatives demonstrate existing pathways for coordination, while practitioner accounts identify uneven capacities to sustain these arrangements. The study contributes an integrated understanding of rain-gardens as socio-ecological and institutional infrastructure and identifies context-sensitive, transferable planning considerations for watershed-informed siting, landscape design, continuing stewardship, and institutional coordination. These findings inform NbS and BGI implementation for sustainable water management, urban resilience, and climate adaptation, emphasizing coordinated planning and long-term management rather than completed installations alone.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112147

Authors: Frida Carmina Caballero-Rico Carlos Barriga Vallejo María Fernanda Soto Zúñiga Frida Porras Caballero Reyna Ivonne Torres Acosta Arturo Mora Olivo

Newly designated protected areas require integrated territorial and community baselines. We characterized the Monarch Butterfly Natural Landscape Protected Area (PNMM), Tamaulipas, Mexico, by combining 2020 Environmental Quality Index (EQI) and Social Lag Index (SLI) classifications for 101 comparable localities (45,352 inhabitants) with 131 semi-structured interviews associated with 50 localities and 22 participatory mapping exercises (72 participants). The indices were examined separately and in a 5 × 5 ordinal cross-tabulation. Under the primary simultaneous-severity criterion (Rule C), 15 localities (1384 inhabitants) had unfavorable conditions in both indices; an exploratory additive criterion (Rule B) identified 23 localities (3218 inhabitants). Preservation showed the highest proportional occurrence of Rule C (4 of 7 comparable localities; 57.1%), although the small denominator limits inference. Of the 131 interviewees, 89 (67.9%) were aged 51 years or older, reflecting this non-probability sample rather than the PNMM population. Interviewees prioritized productive initiatives, training, livelihoods, basic services, and resource governance. Census locality points provided spatial context, not exact fieldwork locations. Because the 2020 indices predate the 2022 designation, the analysis establishes neither causal effects nor a validated composite index.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112146

Authors: Alice Stocco Giuseppe Barbiero Paolo Pischiutti Fabio Pranovi

Specific forms of human interaction with Nature have been associated with a wide range of benefits for human health and well-being. As evidence supporting the restorative and therapeutic potential of Nature grows, increasing attention is being directed towards structured programmes and activities that involve intentional engagement with natural and semi-natural environments to promote physical, mental, and social health, broadly referred to as Nature-Based Interventions (NBIs). While NBIs are rapidly diversifying in their approaches, activities, and settings, considerably less attention has been paid to the selection of the ecosystems in which these interventions take place. Indeed, the ecological characteristics of intervention sites, which can span from urban, peri-urban and wilder ecological systems, are rarely systematically assessed or considered in relation to participant-specific needs. At the same time, growing expectations surrounding the health-promoting potential of some ecosystems may encourage their increasing use. This raises a compelling ecological concern: without careful assessment of ecosystem sensitivity and its carrying capacity, the growing implementation of NBI may place additional pressure on sensitive ecosystems, particularly where uses related to NBI add to existing recreational or other anthropogenic pressures. To address these gaps, we propose the Nature-Based Intervention Planning Tool (NBIPT), an operational framework combining multidimensional Participant and Site Profiles with an independent Ecosystem Sensitivity Assessment. Participant and Site Profiles are compared to identify appropriate candidate sites and potentially relevant mismatches between participant requirements and site characteristics, while the Ecosystem Sensitivity Assessment evaluates whether the intended use of a candidate site is compatible with current ecological and conservation requirements or requires mitigation, spatial or temporal restrictions, or site exclusion. The illustrative cases, based on hypothetical participant profiles and expert-based sites assessments, highlight how the NBIPT can be further used for urban and peri-urban green spaces planning and natural areas uses management. Although further testing and empirical evaluation involving real NBI participants and multiple real-world sites are needed, the NBIPT has the potential to provide an ecologically informed decision-support approach for more personalized, safer, inclusive, and environmentally responsible engagement with Nature.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112145

Authors: Zhi Li Xiaomin Jiang Gengyuan Liu

Ecological condition and development pressure describe related but non-interchangeable aspects of land use change. This study assessed the Guangdong Hong Kong Macao Greater Bay Area at 1 km resolution for 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2025. The Ecological Health Index (EHI) summarised relative landscape ecological condition from land cover, vegetation, productivity, and landscape configuration. A Dynamic Development Pressure Index based on built-up land and population supported temporal comparison, while a 2025 Integrated Development Pressure Index incorporated nighttime light, roads, and artificial shoreline. Mean EHI changed little, but 24.48% of the common valid area declined locally, while development pressure increased regionally. The 2025 assessment produced six primary screening zones. Within the moderate-EHI class, 90.01% of the area had lower pressure and 9.99% had higher pressure, which were retained as secondary management attributes. Grid results were converted to 651 supported planning units, and a minimum-area coastal rule retained 99.91% of coastal management area. Sensitivity analyses showed that the broad regional pattern was stable under recalibrated weights and modest threshold changes, although rare warning and coastal zones were more sensitive to fixed cutoffs and 2 km aggregation. These findings support the use of the framework for regional screening and differentiated land use prioritisation, while local calibration and field verification remain necessary before statutory application.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112143

Authors: Qinghua Zhou Quanxin Man Wanlin Ding Cungang Liu

Street renewal in historic centres requires prioritisation that retains the different reasons for intervention. This study develops a relational diagnostic framework linking service opportunity, walking-environment support, and traffic exposure across 106 street segments in the historic centre of Hefei, China. Opportunity–support typologies are combined with a continuous, sample-relative ranking using POI, functional-area, transport, and archived street-view data. Sidewalk, vegetation, and motor-vehicle visibility enter as distinct components. The 27 selected segments comprise 20 with high opportunity and low support, 6 with high values on both dimensions, and 1 with low values on both. The full framework shares 13 candidates with environment-only screening; adding traffic exposure to service–environment screening introduces ten candidates. Jinzhai Road rises from 48th to 12th when traffic exposure is included, illustrating how transport conditions distinguish a street with relatively favourable environmental support. Varying individual priority coefficients by ±20% retains 25–27 candidates, while adding building visibility retains 19, showing that candidate selection is more sensitive to component interpretation than to moderate coefficient changes. By linking each candidate’s relative rank to its relational type and component profile, the framework distinguishes intervention emphases within a common screening process and supports coordinated renewal across neighbouring streets and nodes.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112144

Authors: Ru Chen

The phenomenon of ‘decoupling’ between scientific knowledge and policy decision-making has been criticized in the academic community. In order to examine this potential disconnect in the development of ecosystem services (ES), this study have chosen China, where an extensive national policy corpus is available, as a case. By addressing uncertainty in bibliometric retrieval and cleaning, then obtained a robust dataset with a high matching degree, including 8466 literature records from citation databases, and a total of 140 documents extracted from the policy and regulations database of China were systematically coded. Employing data mining tools, then applied a four-level and three-dimensional bibliometric index system and the three categories of policy instruments to observe the statistical characteristics of the dataset structure, and used mathematical and statistical models, knowledge visualization, and natural language processing techniques to analyze the literature and policy text corpora to explore and identify potential gaps between scientific knowledge and sustainable practice interactions in the ES field. The results show that although ES scientific knowledge has grown rapidly, the proportion of SCI/SSCI-indexed literature has declined within the sampled records, making relevant literature harder to identify. The knowledge system has notable characteristics in multiple dimensions such as productivity, academic influence, interdisciplinarity, and research cooperation, and ecology and management are the knowledge bases for cross-disciplinary research on ES, where the identified scientific knowledge comprises three units and is subdivided into six sub-fields, evenly distributed in the two major journal categories of natural sciences and social sciences. The sampled Chinese policy documents show substantial textual alignment with this knowledge and form an action framework covering 10 policy topics, with more emphasis on policy guidance in ES conservation practice, supplemented by binding and coercive measures. However, potential gaps appear in the limited textual representation of the knowledge units Ecosystem Services Trade-offs and Synergies and Ecosystem Service Flows and Landscape Change, which provide policymakers and scholars with scientific information on potential improvements in ecosystem conservation and management.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112142

Authors: Yantong Shi Ashutosh Mishra Ashwin Rajaskanda Yang Chen

County-level population concentration and change have different implications for territorial planning. This study examines registered population density and local classifications in 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 for 2121 linked counties, alongside a separate 2020 socioeconomic analysis of 2074 counties using original non-missing inputs. Positive spatial association persists in all four snapshots. Under inverse-distance weights, 163 counties are High–High (HH) at both endpoints, 93 enter HH and 10 leave it; exact memberships are sensitive to alternative neighbourhood rules. Fixed-footprint modelled estimates closely reproduce density rankings but give less consistent endpoint changes. Hongkou District remains HH in every tested year and neighbourhood, while its official registered count decreases by 11.3% between 2005 and 2020; a separate 2010–2020 census-resident comparison also records decline. The case distinguishes persistent concentration from continued growth. Geographically weighted regression describes varying GDP and tertiary-sector associations, predominantly positive bed-count associations and negative area associations. Size baselines and remaining spatial dependence limit interpretation of strong fit and local coefficients. Planning applications should verify population definitions, territorial continuity and actual service use before translating a cluster label into expansion or consolidation.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112141

Authors: Juan Manuel Trujillo-González Raimundo Jiménez-Ballesta

Water and soil conservation in agroecosystems requires understanding of the properties and processes that govern their functioning [...]

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112139

Authors: Jou-Man Huang Yi-Kuei Wang Lee-Hsueh Lee

Dense older urban districts face combined heat and stormwater pressures, yet the thermal and hydrological functions of blue-green infrastructure (BGI) are frequently assessed separately. This study integrates ENVI-met microclimate simulations with a planning-level runoff-retention capacity assessment to compare green roofs, permeable roads, water bodies, and integrated portfolios in Central District, Taichung, Taiwan. Its contribution is a cross-typology hydrothermal comparison under common assumptions that distinguishes among absolute benefits, area-normalized efficiencies, and spatial trade-offs while incorporating implementation constraints. Full permeable-road implementation reduced the domain-averaged, pedestrian-level air temperature by 0.61 °C and physiological equivalent temperature (PET) by 1.37 °C. Water bodies provided the highest equivalent unit-area retention depth (81 cm) but could increase localized radiant exposure when they replaced shaded vegetation. Green roofs offered distributed retention despite limited cooling at 1.5 m. A feasible portfolio combining 50% roof greening, selective permeable-road retrofits, and water-body allocation reduced air temperature by 0.29 °C and PET by 0.46 °C, with a nominal retention capacity of 47,953 m3.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112140

Authors: Pushkin Kachroo

This study presents a theory of the evolution of three-dimensional (3D) urban morphology based on the Eikonal equation, which arises from the wave Partial Differential Equation (PDE) through Huygens principle. Existing models of 3D urban growth either describe the growth of cities without predicting it or simulate it with grid-based transition rules calibrated for each city; in contrast, the proposed model is, to our knowledge, the first continuous PDE model of 3D urban growth derived from a physical principle, in which horizontal expansion, vertical densification and urban planning are parts of one equation. As an extension of our two-dimensional boundary model, the built volume of a city is treated as a region in space whose bounding surface propagates outwards and upwards with spatially varying, direction dependent speeds. We develop the 3D Eikonal PDE, its characteristic equations for ray tracing, the optimal growth (Fermat) principle and the Hamilton–Jacobi model, and, since cities expand horizontally and grow vertically at markedly different rates, we introduce an anisotropic Eikonal equation with separate horizontal and vertical speeds, in which the Huygens wavelets are ellipsoids rather than spheres. We show that the 3D model reduces exactly to a Hamilton–Jacobi equation for the built-volume height field, which separates growth into vertical densification in place and lateral motion of the edges of the built area, and whose ground slice recovers the two-dimensional model. Urban planning enters the PDE through the speed field rather than as an external constraint: zoning and protected land act as obstacles, infrastructure and land release act as incentives, and density and height regulations act as a capacity factor, for which a comparison principle guarantees that the model city never exceeds the planning envelope. The height field formulation further transforms the inverse problem into a direct regression, so that the speed fields can be identified from multi-temporal 3D data without numerical integration of the PDE. Applied to Las Vegas, Dubai and Shenzhen with the Global Human Settlement Layer and, for Shenzhen, annual building heights, the 27-parameter model reduces the 15-year prediction error relative to persistence and a linear trend in 9 of 12 combinations of dataset and period, by 2–23%; under spatially blocked cross-validation the improvement holds in all held-out areas for Las Vegas and for the building height data, but not on average for the other two datasets. The framework demonstrates that horizontally expanding and intensifying cities are governed by the same model, the morphological character of each city being captured by the ratio of its horizontal to vertical propagation speeds, which a spatial bootstrap identifies with a relative standard deviation of about 10%.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112138

Authors: Lijia Chen Jing Deng Jing Ye Weiqing Du Yushan Zheng

Urban greening assessment requires evidence on spatial and annual vegetation–temperature relationships. This study analyzed 5155 warm-season observations from 260 grid cells (300 m × 300 m) across urban and rural Fuzhou, China, during 2019–2025, combining Landsat land-surface temperature (LST) with calendar-year tree and grass classifications derived from Sentinel-2. Generalized additive mixed models separated between-cell differences from within-cell annual deviations, adjusting for meteorology, terrain, building morphology, observation quality, and spatial dependence. The results showed that comparing 60% with 50% mapped vegetation cover yielded adjusted LST contrasts of −0.47 °C in urban centers, −0.42 °C in intermediate settlements, and −0.62 °C in rural areas. Annual mapped cover ten percentage points above a cell’s multiyear mean was associated with a 0.38 °C lower LST (95% CI: 0.30–0.46 °C). Adding tree share increased prediction root mean square error by 0.007 °C in year holdouts and 0.023 °C in buffered spatial holdouts. Against 545 published field references, the combined tree-plus-grass class achieved 95.2% recall and 89.8% specificity, while none of the nine grass references retained the grass label. These adjusted associations support joint assessment of mapped vegetation and surface thermal conditions within the sampled cover range, while annual classification variability and limited composition discrimination constrain interpretation of vegetation changes and tree–grass differences.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112137

Authors: Mingguang He Cailiang Jiang Yanhong Li Yu Yuan

Against the backdrop of continuous advances in economic globalization and urbanization, analyzing the spatial associations and potential pathways through which transportation development affects ecological space is of substantial significance. However, the multi-scale spatial associations between intercity transportation systems and the ecological space of urban agglomerations remain unclear, limiting the further development of research on the relationship between transportation systems and ecological space. Therefore, this paper characterizes multi-scale spatial associations of intercity transportation systems with the ecological space of urban agglomerations, using landscape pattern analysis and a multi-scale geographically weighted regression (MGWR) model. This study selects the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area in China as the study area. The key findings of this study are as follows. (1) Ecological indicators surrounding transportation trunk lines exhibit a significant distance-decay gradient. In general, the closer sites are to transportation trunk lines, the lower the proportion of ecological land and the greater the landscape fragmentation, while landscape connectivity is reduced. In addition, relative to roads, railways generate stronger negative associations with landscape integrity and connectivity. (2) The association between road density and ecological space exhibits substantial differences across analytical units. As the analytical unit becomes finer-grained, the direction of spatial association gradually shifts from unidirectional negative associations to a complex pattern of interwoven positive and negative associations. (3) The association between road density and ecological space exhibits substantial spatial heterogeneity. At the county scale, road density exhibits a significantly weaker negative spatial correlation with ecosystem quality in core metropolitan areas than in peripheral cities. At the grid scale, road density exhibits local positive associations with ecosystem quality. This study not only provides new empirical evidence for resolving the long-standing academic debate between the benefit-oriented perspective and the harm-oriented perspective but also lays a foundation for the coordinated development and spatial governance of the transportation–ecological space nexus.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112136

Authors: Shuqin Li Yufei Zhou Yunhua Qin Nils Haneklaus Binlin Li

The establishment of nature reserves (NRs) in Southwest China has created tensions between conservation and local livelihoods by restricting local communities’ access to natural resources essential to their livelihoods. Understanding farmers’ compensation preferences and livelihood support needs can inform ecological compensation design in communities surrounding nature reserves. This study evaluates the design of ecological compensation policies by examining the preferences of 872 farming households living near 21 NRs in Yunnan Province. A random parameter logit model was used to capture preference heterogeneity, and a latent class model was used to identify distinct household segments. Farmers’ marginal willingness to accept (MWTA) for different policy attributes was quantified, and welfare changes under alternative policy scenarios were estimated using compensating surplus (CS) analysis. The results indicate substantial heterogeneity in farmers’ preferences. Cultural and material compensation were particularly valued, with monetary equivalents of approximately 224.76 and 218.91 CNY/ha/year, respectively. These findings suggest that livelihood support needs extend beyond cash payments. Among the scenarios evaluated, a scheme combining multiple forms of support yielded higher estimated welfare than single-support schemes. Farmers engaged in non-agricultural work, those with low social capital, and those belonging to the Han ethnic group show a lower willingness to participate in the compensation schemes. The findings inform the design of ecological compensation schemes that better reflect farmers’ preferences, livelihood support needs, and local contexts, offering insights into how conservation objectives may be reconciled with rural livelihoods.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112135

Authors: Tukun Wang Wenqing Liu Ningge Zhang Haosen Han Haijiao Ling Yuqing Pan Yixuan Ma Xi Wang

Urban–rural transformation has increased the need to coordinate land use, settlement morphology, and heritage conservation at the edges of peri-urban traditional villages. This study examines 60 peri-urban traditional villages in Chaoshan, China, including 15 grid, 15 comb-shaped, 15 radial, and 15 mixed villages, using boundary-construction spans of 12, 30, and 100 m and four morphological indicators: aspect ratio (λ), weighted shape index (Sq), dispersion (σ), and saturation (θ). Statistical tests, exploratory clustering, machine-learning classification, nested cross-validation, and held-out SHAP interpretation were applied to examine morphological differentiation and its implications for land-use governance. All four indicators differed significantly among the morphology types (p < 0.001), with aspect ratio showing the largest effect (η2 = 0.588). Grid villages exhibited relatively regular edge configurations, comb-shaped villages showed strong elongation (λ = 2.447 ± 0.536), radial villages presented higher dispersion, and mixed villages showed the greatest boundary complexity and heterogeneity (Sq = 2.794 ± 0.902). These morphological differences highlight distinct spatial relationships involving settlement boundaries, axial connections, and core–edge organization. With Sq normalization estimated within training partitions, six classifiers achieved nested Macro-F1 values of 0.595–0.697, while the inner-selected system reached 0.687; SHAP identified aspect ratio as the strongest classification contributor. Grouped P25–P75 comparisons based on Sq, σ, and θ yielded 16, 13, 24, and 7 villages with zero to three out-of-band indicators, respectively, reflecting sample-relative morphological departures rather than verified ecological or heritage risks. From a landscape-ecology perspective, these findings support contextual examination of potential edge effects, corridor continuity, and surrounding land-use relationships. Together with four documented village cases, the study provides a comparative geometric basis for differentiated land-use governance and heritage conservation review, while the effectiveness of specific interventions requires independent field and planning evidence.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112134

Authors: Linlin Zhao Rensheng Chen Guohua Liu

Water conservation is a key regulating service provided by terrestrial ecosystems, and its variation directly affects regional water security and ecosystem health. Existing studies of water conservation have focused largely on quantitative assessment, whereas its qualitative connotation remains unclear. The Three-River Headwaters Region (TRHR), which gives rise to the Yangtze, Yellow, and Lantsang–Mekong rivers, is critical to the water supply of several hundred million people downstream, so an accurate assessment of its water conservation function is essential. However, conventional assessment methods are systematically biased in cold regions because they do not adequately account for the low permeability of frozen ground or the seasonal storage and release of snow. Here we define the water conservation function of the TRHR in both quantitative and qualitative terms (water conservation volume and water conservation capacity). On this basis, a revised InVEST Seasonal Water Yield model was selected and its parameters localized, and the model was further validated using isotope-based runoff source analysis results. The results show that (1) from 1981 to 2020 the mean annual water conservation volume of the TRHR was 123.4 mm (451.6 × 108 m3), increasing at 0.6 mm/a overall, with areas of increasing and decreasing trends accounting for 63.5% and 36.5% of the region, respectively; (2) water conservation capacity (mean 0.79) first declined and then recovered, was lower in the north and higher in the south, and declined mainly in seasonally frozen ground; and (3) water conservation volume was positively regulated by precipitation and negatively by evapotranspiration. Water conservation capacity varied with air temperature (positive below 0 °C and negative above 0 °C), elevation (negative), NDVI (positive), and freezing depth (negative), and ranked by land cover as marsh > forest > high/medium/low-cover grassland > cropland > bare land > desert. This framework can serve as a reference for assessing the water conservation function of the TRHR.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112133

Authors: Huamei Shao Qing Li Xinyu Wang Gunwoo Kim Wei Cao

Understanding the long-term dynamics and spatial associations between vegetation and land surface temperature (LST) is important for characterizing urban thermal environments and informing climate-resilient urban planning. This study examined the spatiotemporal dynamics of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and LST in Zhengzhou, China, from 1990 to 2022 using Landsat imagery processed on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. Annual NDVI and LST composites were generated from cloud- and cloud-shadow-masked Landsat observations. City-wide annual trends were examined using linear regression, while pixel-level trends were assessed using the Theil–Sen estimator and the Mann–Kendall (MK) test with trend-free pre-whitening (TFPW). Spatial patterns in five representative years (1990, 2000, 2010, 2020, and 2022) were further examined using district-level statistics and bivariate Moran’s I analysis to characterize spatial heterogeneity and local spatial associations. The results showed an overall increase in city-wide NDVI (0.00452/year) and city-wide LST (0.0667 °C/year). At the pixel level, significant increasing trends (p < 0.01) were identified for both NDVI and LST, with mean Sen’s slopes of 0.002434/year and 0.2957 °C/year, respectively. NDVI increased mainly in the southwestern mountainous areas and along the Yellow River, whereas relatively low NDVI and high LST persisted in densely urbanized districts. Bivariate Moran’s I analysis further revealed a significant negative spatial association between NDVI and neighboring LST values, indicating that areas with greater vegetation tended to be spatially associated with lower LST in neighboring areas. This spatial association should be distinguished from the temporal trends of the two variables, which both increased over the study period. However, vegetation improvement was insufficient to fully offset the warming associated with rapid urbanization. These findings highlight the spatial heterogeneity of long-term vegetation and thermal changes and demonstrate the value of annual multi-observation satellite composites and GEE for urban environmental monitoring. They also provide spatially explicit evidence to support targeted green infrastructure planning and urban heat mitigation.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112132

Authors: Wenwen Li Jing Guan Shang Chen Xueying Ji Shuai He Shuhao Liu Meihua Cui Yuemei Jin

Traditional land evaluation systems lack an independent quantitative assessment of the ecological value of residential land, resulting in significant theoretical and methodological limitations. Existing evaluation standards primarily focus on economic value, whereas ecological value is considered only implicitly and is not reported separately. This deficiency systematically underestimates the ecological value of residential land, distorts land transaction prices, and constrains the improvement of land transfer systems and ecological compensation mechanisms. This study proposes a methodology based on ecosystem service theory to identify, quantify, value, and convert the ecological value of residential land. The methodology was empirically validated using eight residential land parcels (703.99–1296.05 m2) in Yantai City, Shandong Province, China. Across the eight land parcels, ecological asset values range from USD 0.3891 million to USD 8.6161 million. The proportion of underestimated ecological asset value ranges from 22.05% to 40.22%. Among the eight parcels, only one has undergone a land transaction in which ecological and economic values were priced separately, resulting in a total transaction price of USD 60.6293 million. For this parcel, the total ecological asset value is USD 5.6624 million, generating an ecological income of USD 6.0496 million. Its total economic value is USD 51.0863 million, generating an economic income of USD 54.5797 million. The corresponding ecological asset value conversion rate is 106.84%. Because the remaining parcels have similar geographical locations and market conditions to the transacted parcel, the same ecological asset value conversion rate was applied to estimate their ecological income. Based on this approach, the estimated ecological income from the transfer of the eight residential land parcels ranges from USD 0.4150 million to USD 9.2061 million. This study addresses the prevailing economic bias in conventional land evaluation methods. It provides a feasible technical framework for the explicit quantification and independent valuation of the ecological asset value of residential land. The ecological income generated through this approach provides a potential new source of funding for land-based ecological protection and restoration. It also promotes greater coordination between the land transfer market and ecological compensation mechanisms.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112131

Authors: Li Yao Zifei Ping Yufang Sun Wei Zhou Hui Zheng Qiangqiang Ding Xiang Liao

In the published publication [...]

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112130

Authors: Linda A. Rodulfo-Gómez

This systematic review aims to characterize recent research on implementing the European Landscape Convention (ELC) in Spain and Italy, and synthesize governance instruments for incorporating landscape into spatial planning. Following PRISMA 2020 reporting guidelines, it examines peer-reviewed literature published in 2020–2025 using multilingual searches, explicit ELC-engagement criteria, Quality Assessment with Diverse Studies (QuADS) appraisal of reporting completeness, full-text thematic synthesis, and exploratory keyword co-occurrence analysis. The 24 included studies were organized into four non-exclusive research lines and five instrument families: legal and public-policy instruments; institutional arrangements and observatories; planning instruments; participatory instruments; and knowledge and technology tools. Planning (18/24 studies) and knowledge-related instruments (17/24) were the most represented categories. The methodological contribution lies in study-level traceability linking thematic research lines, instrument families, and reported evidence, distinguishing identification and reported application from demonstrated effects. Case studies document tensions in municipal uptake and administrative coordination. The small, eligibility-bounded corpus limits generalization and does not support a comprehensive assessment of national implementation or instrument effectiveness. The review forms part of a broader research agenda on landscape governance instruments for Colombian territorial planning. The review excluded Latin American records under the ELC-engagement criterion, precluding conclusions about practices in that region. The synthesis serves as a starting point for future research into the integration of landscape into spatial planning, particularly in the Colombian Caribbean, drawing on the European Landscape Convention as one of several possible points of reference.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112129

Authors: Jingming Liu Yawei Ren Xianhui Hou Yang Liu

Built-environment differences across transit-oriented development (TOD) types shape the capitalization of metrorail accessibility into housing prices, generating spatially heterogeneous effects. Using Shanghai as a case study, this study calculates by-transit accessibility (BTA) based on transit supply–demand ratios and interstation passenger flows and derives metrorail accessibility through a distance-decay function. These measures, alongside station locations and built-environment indicators, inform an extended Node–Place model using K-means clustering to identify TOD types. Building on this classification, distance-threshold and price-grouped hedonic models are employed to examine the spatial heterogeneity of accessibility-price relationships. Results reveal clear spatial differentiation in TOD types. Accessibility thresholds generally increase from the urban core to peripheral areas, ranging from 359.5 to 766.77 m in Stressed and Extended TODs to 885.82–1543.75 m in Balanced and Demand TODs, indicating that no uniform station catchment radius applies across TOD contexts. The direction and degree of accessibility effects also vary by station-area development, distance, and housing price group. TAZ metrorail accessibility is positively associated with housing prices, with stronger effects on upper-middle- and high-price housing in Stressed, Extended, and Balanced TODs, but on low-price and high-price housing near Demand TODs. These differences suggest unequal opportunities to benefit from transit-related locational advantages. The findings inform better coordination of transport, land use, and housing toward more equitable and sustainable urban development.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112128

Authors: Huixuan Zhang Baojian Zhang

To examine whether combining the smart city pilot policy with the low-carbon city pilot policy contributes to urban inclusive green growth, and to investigate the effects and underlying mechanisms of this policy combination across different implementation scenarios, this study takes 262 Chinese cities as its sample and uses data from 2011 to 2023 for empirical analysis. The study defines the digital-green policy combination according to whether both pilot policies are in effect and adopts a multi-period difference-in-differences model to estimate its effects. Empirical results indicate that the digital-green policy combination positively affects urban inclusive green growth, with a coefficient of 0.1395 (p < 0.01). Tests by city type reveal that, compared with non-pilot cities and single-pilot cities, the digital-green policy combination yields incremental benefits for urban inclusive green growth. Analyses by policy implementation phase show that the coefficient of the dual-pilot phase is 0.2192, which exceeds the coefficients for the smart city pilot-only phase and the low-carbon city pilot-only phase by 0.1660 (p < 0.01) and 0.0984 (p < 0.05), respectively. Mechanism analysis shows that the digital-green policy combination negatively affects carbon emission intensity, with a coefficient of −0.2040 (p < 0.05), and that carbon emission intensity plays a mediating role. Both digital knowledge flow and green finance positively moderate the impact of the digital-green policy combination on urban inclusive green growth. Further analysis reveals that both the “smart city policy first” and “low-carbon city policy first” sequences have positive impacts on urban inclusive green growth, but their effects do not differ significantly. The time interval between policy implementations does not significantly moderate the impact of the digital-green policy combination on urban inclusive green growth. The digital-green policy combination significantly promotes inclusive green growth in key environmental protection cities, cities with ecological compensation, cities without ecological compensation, cities with high digital talent and cities with low digital talent. The differences in coefficients between groups classified by key environmental protection status and ecological compensation status are both statistically significant, whereas the differences in coefficients between groups classified by digital talent levels are not statistically significant. Positive spatial spillover effects are also identified, indicating that the benefits of the digital-green policy combination extend to other cities through economic–geographic linkages.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112126

Authors: Xiangyang Cao Donghui Shi

Understanding functional changes in metropolitan land use is essential for improving land management and supporting sustainable urban development. Using multitemporal, multisource data, this paper examines the metropolitan land use transition in Jinan within the framework of “process-pattern-mechanism-optimization”. The results show that: First, the spatial evolution of urban land in Jinan presented a development pattern characterized by “core agglomeration, outward expansion and functional zoning”. The area-weighted land-use centroid shifted southeastward, northeastward and southwestward during 2005–2010, 2010–2015 and 2015–2020, respectively, while the standard deviational ellipses retained an approximately east–west orientation. Second, the relative predictive contributions of selected factors varied across land-use categories and periods. Transportation and terrain were prominent during 2005–2010; distance to water systems was important for GCL and ECL during 2010–2015; and railways were the leading predictor for ICTL during 2015–2020. Third, the 2030 scenarios show differences in functional land allocation and ECL retention. Natural development projects GCL expansion and ECL loss; balanced development reduces GCL while increasing STIRDL and MSL; and industrial upgrading expands STIRDL and EIL. These findings can inform land use planning in Jinan and provide a basis for comparative studies of other metropolitan areas.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112127

Authors: Yifan Li Songjiang Wu Tingxuan Tang Huiting Liu Zicheng Wang

Aligning rural digitalization and agricultural modernization with risk-coping and adaptive capacities is important for sustainable rural development. Using panel data from 30 Chinese provinces (2011–2024), we assess coordination and mismatches in relative development positions among digital village development, agricultural modernization, and rural resilience using entropy weighting, coupling coordination analysis, and provincial ranking comparisons. Two-way fixed effects (TWFE) and geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) examine associations with government, market, and social conditions. All three subsystems improved, but growth rates and provincial rankings differed. The national mean coupling coordination degree increased from 0.336 to 0.545, while the absolute gap between leading and lagging provinces widened. In 2024, five provinces combined relatively high digital village development with relatively low rural resilience, and seven showed the same pattern for agricultural modernization. In the TWFE model, government and market conditions were positively associated with coupling coordination, whereas social conditions showed no statistically significant association. GTWR revealed spatiotemporal variation, with stronger government associations in some central and western provinces and stable market associations. Temporal trends and provincial rankings were robust to weighting choices, whereas discrete coordination categories were sensitive to them. The findings support place-based policies integrating digital and agricultural development with resilience building.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112125

Authors: Mohamed Houssemeddine Sellami Giuliano Ferraro Fabio Terribile

Nature-based solutions (NbSs) are increasingly promoted to restore degraded urban soils, yet the research linking them to urban and anthropogenic soils has not been mapped as a coherent field. We present a bibliometric synthesis of this literature, which, to our knowledge, is the first whose corpus is the research linking NbSs explicitly to urban and anthropogenic soils. This corpus comprises 109 documents indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science (2016–2026). Performance analysis and science mapping (bibliometrix) and a term co-occurrence network (VOSviewer) are combined with a full-text screening for named soil classes, for measured functional soil properties (texture, bulk density, hydraulic conductivity, organic matter, pH) and for the use of either in the design of the intervention. The field is young and expanding rapidly and resolves into five clusters (urban greening and planning, plant–soil and Technosol systems, soil monitoring and modeling, remediation and brownfield redevelopment, and foundational soil properties) that differ in mean age by less than one year. Of the 103 full texts assessed, 22 measure within-site variation of a soil property, but none uses measured variation in functional properties to place, size or calibrate an NbS. Soil classes are named in 27 full texts (26.2%) and measured soil properties are reported in 41 full texts (39.8%), yet only one study uses soil typology, and nine a measured property, as a design variable. Because bibliometric indicators describe the structure of a literature rather than the strength of evidence, this review maps the landscape and its gaps rather than ranking interventions. Within this corpus, the main research need is to design NbSs that account for the measured properties and variability of urban soils.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112124

Authors: Jianrong Li Jiannan Hou Kaijun Cao

The integration and synchronization of high-quality tourism development and ecological resilience are key issues for regional sustainable development. Taking the 11 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) in western China as the study area, this work develops a system of evaluative indicators for high-quality tourism development and ecological resilience. Utilizing the entropy-weighted TOPSIS method, the coupling coordination degree model, the spatial autocorrelation model, and the barrier degree model, it systematically analyzes the development levels of these two factors, their spatiotemporal evolution in terms of coupling and coordination, and the underlying barriers from 2009 to 2024. The findings indicate the following: (1) High-quality tourism development exhibits a pattern of Shaanxi standing out, the Southwest fluctuating, and the Northwest lagging behind. Shaanxi has consistently remained in the high-level category; Sichuan, Chongqing, and Yunnan experienced an initial rise followed by a decline; and Xinjiang made a significant leap from a low point, while Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia are trapped in a dilemma of “high endowment but low development”. Ecological resilience exhibits a pattern of “Qinghai standing out, the Southwest rising, and the Northwest being vulnerable,” with Qinghai as the only region with high resilience, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and Chongqing steadily climbing, and the provinces and regions in the Northwest forming a vulnerable belt. (2) The degree of coupling and coordination exhibits the characteristics of “sustained growth in the Southwest and stagnation at low levels in the Northwest.” The global Moran’s index ranges from 0.183 to 0.439, with significant spatial positive correlation; Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi form a stable “high–high” cluster, while Qinghai stands as an isolated “low–low” region. (3) An analysis of constraint severity indicates that the “Restoration” criterion has the highest constraint severity; per capita water resources rank first among the 11 provinces and regions, making it the most critical bottleneck constraining the coordinated improvement of the two dimensions. The number of performances by arts troupes and foreign exchange earnings from international tourism are common constraints in the tourism category. This study concludes that the key to enhancing the coordinated development of high-quality tourism and ecological resilience in the western regions lies in: differentiating approaches to improve tourism quality, advancing ecological restoration on a category-by-category basis, strengthening spatial outreach and assistance, addressing water resource constraints on a category-by-category basis, and addressing shortcomings in adjustable governance areas.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112123

Authors: Jian Xu Yifan Chen Ruiqu Ma Wenlei Ding Houjun Li Muliang Yu Genyu Xu

Understanding the differentiated roles of natural, socioeconomic, and landscape factors in ecosystem service supply–demand relationships is important for sustainable management of ecologically fragile basins. Taking the Dianchi Lake Basin as a case study, this study integrated landscape pattern analysis based on the FRAGSTATS software, ecosystem service assessment using the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model, and extreme gradient boosting with SHapley Additive exPlanations (XGBoost–SHAP) to examine landscape dynamics, ecosystem service supply–demand relationships, and their associated factors from 2000 to 2020. The results showed that built-up land expansion was accompanied by increased landscape fragmentation and spatial heterogeneity. Meanwhile, persistent supply–demand mismatches occurred across all three ecosystem services, with water yield deficits concentrated in the central and north-central parts of the basin. Furthermore, the XGBoost–SHAP analysis revealed service- and dimension-specific predictive importance: landscape factors accounted for the largest aggregated SHAP shares for water purification supply, demand, and matching, whereas socioeconomic and anthropogenic factors showed the largest shares for water yield and carbon storage demand. These findings provide quantitative support for differentiated ecosystem service management in ecologically fragile plateau lake basins.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112122

Authors: Da Gao Qingshuo Wang Linfang Tan Zhixuan Ke

In the context of China’s urban green and low-carbon transformation, administrative environmental protection has significant implications for territorial spatial governance. This study develops a theoretical model of local government land sale decision-making to examine whether the flattening reform of government environmental protection institutions (FRPPI) enhances the green utilization efficiency of urban land. Drawing on panel data from 279 Chinese cities spanning 2011 to 2023, we measure land green utilization efficiency via a super-efficiency slack-based model and employ double machine learning to assess FRPPI’s impact and underlying mechanisms. The findings indicate that the FRPPI significantly improves urban land green utilization efficiency. Mechanism analysis reveals that FRPPI strengthens the determination and supervisory capacity of environmental protection authorities, as well as their willingness and enforcement capabilities, jointly boosting land-use performance. Heterogeneity analysis reveals stronger effects in cities characterized by greater administrative power, higher economic growth pressure, and more demanding environmental governance conditions.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112121

Authors: Jiaxuan Wu Yuxin Cui

Agricultural machinery social services can transform smallholder farming into service-based agricultural-scale production; however, their development relies on stable land property rights. To examine the impact of land tenure certification on farmers’ agricultural machinery social service adoption, this study employs a staggered difference-in-differences model using data from the China National Rural Fixed Observation Survey for 2005–2017 and township-level land tenure certification records. The results show that land tenure certification significantly increases service adoption, more so among farmers with lower agricultural total factor productivity. Additionally, the impact is more pronounced among farmers with larger cultivated areas and those in plain regions and regions with higher factor marketization. Mechanism analyses reveal that land tenure certification promotes service adoption by facilitating off-farm employment and encouraging machinery investment among less- and more-competitive farmers, respectively. These findings highlight the role of property rights reforms in optimizing factor allocation and advancing agricultural transformation.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112120

Authors: Sara Popović Nives Doneus Michael Doneus Žiga Kokalj

Publicly available airborne laser scanning (ALS) data offers considerable potential for archaeological research, yet remains extending across modern borders are often divided among national and regional datasets. This paper presents a cross-border approach to ALS data from Croatia, Slovenia and the Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia. The datasets were harmonised, rasterised at a resolution of 0.5 m and integrated into a single Web Map Service designed for archaeological interpretation. This integrated dataset has significant research potential, as demonstrated by a case study of Roman land division across the Gulf of Trieste and the Istrian Peninsula, which covers an area of approx. 4000 km2. At a macro level, the analysis identifies four distinct land divisions, suggesting their boundaries and their landscape context. Examining these systems within a continuous geographical framework allows for a fresh perspective on Roman territorial organisation. At a finer scale, the study focuses on patterns of subdivision within individual centuriae. ALS data enable a more detailed analysis of Roman land use, offering a new interpretation of these subdivisions. Thus, the study demonstrates how harmonised, cross-border ALS data can connect broader questions of Roman territorial organisation with a detailed analysis of the physical remains.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112119

Authors: Jinlong Hu Zaixian Yang Lei Wang Zhuoya Zhou Nan Luo

Identifying changes in rocky desertification sensitivity is an important basis for land degradation prevention and sustainable use in karst World Natural Heritage sites. This study incorporates recent sensitivity deterioration into zoning rules to distinguish prevention and restoration priorities under conservation constraints. Using multisource data for five observation years from 2005 to 2023, we constructed the rocky desertification sensitivity index (RDSI) for the Guilin Karst World Natural Heritage Site. We analysed the spatiotemporal changes and spatial clustering of RDSI and the composition of its dominant sensitivity components. The optimal parameter-based geographical detector then assessed associations with external factors and their interactions. Management zoning integrated 2023 sensitivity classes, class changes from 2020 to 2023, tourism development potential and core zone protection constraints. Sensitivity declined overall, with mean RDSI falling from 4.112 to 3.540 (13.91%), although the direction of change varied among periods. Improvement covered 36.47% of the area from 2015 to 2020, whereas deterioration covered 17.49% from 2020 to 2023. RDSI showed significant spatial clustering in all five years, and types dominated by slope or fractional rock cover predominated. Among external factors, elevation had the highest spatial explanatory power in every year, with a multiyear mean q value of 0.362, followed by land-use intensity and mean annual temperature. Interaction detection showed that the combination of precipitation and elevation had the highest mean joint q value (0.465). The study area was ultimately divided into five management zones, among which conservation maintenance and low disturbance use predominated, accounting for 42.83% and 27.29%, respectively. The remaining areas were assigned to risk prevention, priority restoration, and conservation and use coordination zones. These findings show that declining sensitivity over the long term can coexist with recent localised deterioration. Integrating current sensitivity classes, recent change, tourism development potential and protection constraints helps identify spatial priorities for core zone conservation, field verification of recently deteriorating patches and assessment of restoration needs, and low disturbance use in peripheral areas.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112118

Authors: Yanhe Niu Yonghua Li Huaiyu Zhou Jinyue Han Jie Zhang Shidong Ge Huawei Li Jiayi Lin Sheng Jiao

Rapid urbanization alters natural runoff processes in hilly cities and increases flood risk, yet translating runoff-process understanding into coordinated land-use decisions remains challenging. Multi-scenario land-use simulation for 2035 linked runoff-process understanding with stormwater security pattern optimization. In Changsha, land use, natural runoff channels and low-lying areas informed flood-control constraints in the Patch-generating Land-Use Simulation (PLUS) model. Inundation was simulated by coupling the Soil Conservation Service curve number (SCS-CN) model with an equal-volume inundation algorithm. Qualitative comparisons of simulated inundations with historical records showed good spatial agreement. Under a 100-year, 3 h rainfall scenario, new construction land within high-risk zones covered 20.58, 6.14 and 21.70 km2 in the baseline, flood-safety, and economic-development scenarios, respectively. An integrated plan balanced flood safety and economic development, reducing this overlap to 6.45 km2, 68.7% below baseline. Its high-risk area was 319.24 km2, with a total inundation volume of 715.89 million m3. The optimized pattern comprised seven corridor levels, 26 lakes and reservoirs, 27 low-lying control zones and 197.78 km2 of other inundation zones. The latter two categories had an estimated combined storage requirement of 386.57 million m3. These comparisons provide a planning basis for optimizing stormwater security patterns through blue–green infrastructure in hilly cities.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112117

Authors: Wenxin Cai Jianbo Hu Haichao Yu

Rapid urbanization concentrates infrastructure demand and places pressure on public services, environmental quality, and resilience. This study assesses provincial capacity to support green and low-carbon urban renewal in China. It examines how this capacity changes and relates to potential interprovincial connections. An index was constructed from 18 indicators across six dimensions for 30 provincial-level regions during 2020–2024. Dimensions received equal weights, with entropy weighting applied within each dimension. The analysis combined kernel-density estimation, spatial autocorrelation, a modified gravity model, social network analysis, and QAP regression. The national mean index increased from 0.222 to 0.360. Global Moran’s I was insignificant in 2020 but significantly positive in 2021–2024. The network of model-derived potential associations was sparse, with distinct incoming, outgoing, and brokerage positions. Urbanization-stage, fiscal-autonomy, and construction-capacity differences, together with geographical adjacency, were positively associated with these modeled ties. Capacity rankings and modeled network positions provide complementary information for identifying relative renewal-capacity shortfalls and screening potential cooperation partners.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112116

Authors: Xiaolu Huang Ya Wu Yu Zhang Tingyi Liu

Evaluating urban construction land use efficiency (UCLUE) from the dual perspectives of intensification and low-carbon performance is critical for sustainable urban development. Previous studies often assess this efficiency from a single perspective, failing to capture potential conflicts and synergies between economic density and emission reduction goals. This study adopts a two-stage super-SBM approach to evaluate UCLUE of 268 Chinese cities from 2001 to 2021, systematically examining both intensification and low-carbon dimensions. Results show that (1) the average efficiency from an intensification perspective remains relatively low and exhibits a fluctuating pattern of initial increase, subsequent decline, and final rebound, with the eastern region ranking highest, followed by the western and central regions. (2) The low-carbon efficiency follows a U-shaped trajectory over the study period, with the eastern region again performing best, followed by the western and central regions. (3) Many cities exhibit relatively low efficiency in both dimensions, with 146 of the 268 cities (54.48%) falling into the Low–Low development mode and only 53 cities (19.78%) achieving the High–High development mode. Furthermore, cities with larger population sizes demonstrate stronger sustainable performance. These findings provide empirical evidence for identifying spatial heterogeneities and formulating differentiated, context-specific land use policies to coordinate urban expansion and carbon reduction.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112115

Authors: Diego Rivera Francisco Alcaraz Javier Valera Julio Navarro Inmaculada Camarero Paulina Contreras Carlos Cano Diego José Rivera-Obón Encarnación Gil Meseguer José María Gómez Espín Concepción Obón

Understanding long-term land-use change is essential for interpreting Mediterranean cultural landscapes. This study reconstructs the landscape and agroecosystem dynamics of the former royal estate of Monteagudo-Cabezo de Torres (Murcia, SE Spain) from the 12th century to the present. We integrated archaeobotanical remains, historical documentation, radiocarbon dating and floristic inventories (19th century-2026), explicitly accounting for sampling biases in historical surveys. The results reveal a multi-layered landscape. Irrigated gardens and orchards coexisted with assisted dry farming on the upper slopes, which left a geomorphological legacy of terraces and runoff management. Rice was grown above the Almarjal between the 13th and 16th centuries, and ornamental species appear from the 13th to the 21st century. From the 19th century, dry-farming areas shifted to Opuntia ficus-indica and then to citrus, a transition that accelerated after the Tajo–Segura water transfer (post-1979), the most rapid landscape transformation in the area’s history. The flora shows substantial turnover, including at least 11 high-confidence local extirpations, eight of them dating from the medieval period, and a sharp recent increase in naturalized exotic species (48 in 2026). Integrating multiple lines of evidence resolves apparent contradictions among datasets and offers a robust, temporally deep framework to inform heritage conservation and sustainable land management in Mediterranean landscapes.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112113

Authors: Jun Gao Na Fang Ning Xu

Against the backdrop of tightening construction land constraints compounded by the “dual carbon” goals, the quality of industrial space supply both constrains the expansion of digital industries and shapes the pace of green transformation. The new industrial land-use policy (NILUP) is an institutional reform that starts from the rules of industrial space supply. This study treats the staggered issuance of NILUP documents by cities in batches as a quasi-natural experiment. Based on panel data for prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2024, it applies staggered difference-in-differences, event study, heterogeneity-robust estimation, double machine learning, and spatial econometric methods to identify the effect of NILUP on urban digital–green synergistic transformation (DGT), measured by a composite index built with the coupling coordination degree model. Under the identifying assumptions of parallel trends and no unobserved time-varying confounding, the results show that NILUP significantly raises urban DGT by 0.0122, and the coefficient remains positive after replacing the estimator, adjusting the sample, and changing how the index is constructed. The improvement comes from a joint rise in the levels of the digital and green subsystems rather than from closer coupling between them, as the coupling degree does not increase significantly. Furthermore, NILUP improves urban land-use efficiency and raises a gravity-based factor-attraction index, which is consistent with factor attraction but is not direct evidence of realized factor inflows. By city type, the promoting effect of NILUP is stronger in provincial capitals and sub-provincial cities, large-scale cities, and non-resource-based cities. On policy interaction, DGT improves more markedly when NILUP is implemented jointly with Broadband China and new-type urbanization, although the new-type urbanization interaction is identified from only 15 cities and is exploratory. Across the examined spatial specifications, there is no stable evidence of spillovers to the DGT of neighboring cities, and the local effect remains robust after controlling for spatial exposure. The findings indicate that restructuring industrial land supply rules can provide spatial support for urban digital–green synergistic transformation. Embedding green constraints simultaneously in industry entry and performance supervision could also be considered.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112114

Authors: Bo Mu Han Li Siyu Fan Xiao Wang Yali Zhang Jun Du Weiqiang Chen

The evolution process and utilization status jointly determine the spatial heterogeneity of the Earth’s surface. Planning policies should be customized for specific geographical regions. This paper proposes an innovative spatial zoning method that accounts for both the utilization status (development pattern and development intensity) and evolutionary processes (development trend) of land space, with Zhengzhou in China, selected as the case study. The impact of land cover transition on land surface temperature (LST) changes in different spatial zones was assessed. The reasons for zone formation were revealed through correlation analysis and policy review. Tailor-made optimization strategies were proposed. The results showed that the study area could be divided into 18 spatial zones. They were formed as a result of long-term changes in land cover and human activities. The ELG (ecology-dominant low-intensity growth area), ALS (agriculture-dominant low-intensity shrinkage area), and UMG (urban-dominant medium-intensity growth area) zones accounted for the largest proportions, representing the current land use status and previous change trends. The transition from agricultural land to built-up land (41.34% of which was distributed in the UMG zone) may be associated with LST warming, whereas the conversion from agricultural land to green space (67.04% of which was distributed in the ELG zone) may be associated with LST cooling. These two changes contribute most to LST changes. Greater attention should be paid to the combined and transfer effects of land cover processes, as well as seasonal exposure during agricultural production. Topography fundamentally influences zone distribution, while human activities and planning policies shape spatial patterns. In the future, planning policies should be customized for different spatial zones. The zoning methodology and optimization strategies can provide a useful reference for future territorial spatial planning in the study area and other urban regions.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112112

Authors: Yuhan Shao Panpan Niu Yifan Wang Zimeng Xu Shuang Zhou Zhuopeng Zhang Fang Wang Jianhua Ren

Against the backdrop of global climate warming, accurately assessing changes in regional ecosystem carbon stocks and their responses to future scenarios is crucial for achieving the “dual carbon” goals. This study selects the Yellow River Delta High-Efficiency Ecological Economic Zone as the research area, utilizing land-use data from 2000, 2010, and 2020. By employing the PLUS–InVEST model, the spatiotemporal evolution of carbon stocks was investigated at the county scale, and land-use patterns and carbon stock distributions in 2030 were predicted under three scenarios: natural development, urban expansion, and ecological conservation. Results show that total carbon stocks declined between 2000 and 2020. The northeastern coastal region, characterized by concentrated water bodies and construction land, experienced significant reductions in carbon storage. Meanwhile, parts of Zouping City in the southwest and Laizhou City in the east, dominated by forestlands, emerged as high-carbon stock zones. Moreover, carbon stocks exhibit marked spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamics at the county level, with Laizhou, Shouguang, and Wudi ranking among the highest in total carbon storage, while Qingyun, Yangxin, and Gaoqing remained consistently low. Scenario predictions further reveal substantial differences in carbon stock impacts across development pathways. Specifically, under natural development, carbon stocks continue their historical downward trend, with carbon sources primarily located along the coast, resulting in an overall net carbon source. Urban development amplifies this trend, expanding carbon source areas and intensifying the net carbon source status. In contrast, ecological conservation effectively mitigates carbon loss, maintaining overall carbon storage stability while generating localized carbon sink patches within urban centers. The integrated technical framework developed in this study not only provides a quantifiable and verifiable decision-support tool for territorial spatial governance and coordinated implementation of the dual carbon goals in the Yellow River Delta, but also offers a scalable methodological model for evaluating ecosystem carbon sequestration potential and adaptive management in China’s coastal ecological regions.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112111

Authors: Zhengfeng An Chong Li Ali El-Naggar M. Anne Naeth Scott X. Chang

Biochar is increasingly used in environmental applications, such as remediating soils and water contaminated with toxic elements, because of its high adsorption capacity. However, the environmental fate of toxic elements in spent biochar if used as a soil amendment is poorly understood. In this study, wheat straw and cattle manure biochars, with their lead (Pb)-loaded counterparts (spent biochars) prepared in the laboratory, were applied to a Black Chernozemic soil in an 8-week incubation experiment to evaluate the extractability of Pb in the soil–biochar mixtures and the associated risk of Pb contamination. Pb loading lowered biochar pH by 3.70 units for the wheat straw biochar (from 9.91 to 6.21) and by 3.14 units for the cattle manure biochar (from 10.98 to 7.83), corresponding to approximately 5000-fold and 1400-fold increases in H+ activity. Both spent biochars increased organic acid-extractable Pb (phytoavailable) in the soil–biochar mixtures relative to the control, but to different degrees. Pooled across sampling times (geometric means), organic acid-extractable Pb was 20.3 mg kg−1 under the spent wheat straw biochar and 1.7 mg kg−1 under the spent cattle manure biochar, compared with 0.19 mg kg−1 in the control; potentially mobile Pb followed the same order. Between weeks 4 and 8, the potentially mobile Pb increased under both spent biochars, markedly under the spent cattle manure biochar, whereas phytoavailable Pb declined significantly in the control and the two pristine biochar treatments, indicating that the two operationally defined Pb pools changed differently over time. No significant differences in soil pH or electrical conductivity were detected among treatments after the incubation, and treatment mean pH differed by at most 0.12 units. Bulk soil pH is therefore unlikely to explain differences between the two spent biochars. These results do not show which biochar binds Pb more strongly because the amount of Pb retained by each biochar was not quantified; they do show that, under the conditions tested, land application of Pb-loaded biochar can increase extractable Pb in soil, that the magnitude of this increase differed between the two feedstocks, and that this risk should be assessed before spent biochars are used as a soil amendment.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112110

Authors: Seyedeh Zahra Hosseini Parizad Saghari Chiha Martin Wynn

Rapid urbanisation has intensified critical environmental challenges, notably in developing world towns and cities. This article examines the relationship between three core concepts in this urban landscape: Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), Smart City Technologies (SCTs), and Sustainable Urban Mobility (SUM). Through a Systematic Literature Review, the article develops a provisional conceptual framework (PCF) for mapping these concepts, identifying synergistic domains and mobility dimensions. This framework is then applied in an analysis of the Tehran urban environment, using GIS data and a follow-up evaluation questionnaire with expert practitioners. The findings reveal spatial inequalities in the occurrence of these three concepts across the Tehran municipality, highlighting the limited integration of NBS with smart mobility initiatives and more specifically the distinction between spatial co-location and actual functional integration. Results from the Tehran case study are used to evolve the PCF into a tiered operational model comprising spatial and technology components and implementation mechanisms and constraints. The model provides a structured basis for identifying where and how NBS and SCTs can be integrated within SUM infrastructure, although its practical application requires further evaluation. The findings will be of relevance to other scholars involved in urban sustainability research and to planners and practitioners faced with the challenges of developing more sustainable urban environments.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112109

Authors: Adolf Sotoca Madalen Gonzalez Bereziartua Carolina Fiallo

The fifteen-minute city is commonly based on strategies that aim to keep daily destinations within walking distance. However, thermal conditions are rarely considered, and these strategies fail to deliver in dense, vulnerable neighbourhoods during heatwaves. This study examines whether pedestrian proximity is thermally habitable at a walking scale. We measured air, shaded-surface, and sunlit-surface temperatures, as well as relative humidity, at different times of the day along two everyday itineraries in Santa Coloma de Gramenet. The study area stands as one of metropolitan Barcelona’s most vulnerable municipalities, and the field campaign took place during the July 2026 heatwave. Each reading was expressed as a differential from a simultaneous reference at the origin, and points were classified through a Thermal Load Index. We then compared the registered data with plan-view and satellite images, yielding four main findings. First, thermal contrast lives in surfaces, not air: sunlit-surface temperature varies two to three times more than air temperature (as expected), so air-based metrics under-represent lived exposure. Second, extremity concentrates in a few discrete micro-sites rather than a smooth gradient. Third, and most consequentially, plan-view greenness (NDVI) is largely decoupled from pedestrian thermal exposure; cool shelters instead arise from urban morphology—enclosure, orientation, and ventilation—often without vegetation. Fourth, exposure reverses between morning and evening. We read the study area as a situated urban microclimate, reframing green-centred heat adaptation in terms of walkable urban form.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112108

Authors: Gerardo Ureta

Rapid-transit stations are usually judged as transport nodes, yet the walkable area around them decides whether residents can meet daily needs nearby. This study treats each station area as a service system and measures the supply of five civic dimensions (sports, commerce, health, green space and schools) within the 15 min walking catchments of the 126 operating stations of the Santiago Metro, Chile. Catchments were routed on a directed, slope-sensitive pedestrian network, and census counts were allocated by cadastral residential floor area. A Civic Deficit Index, defined against the network benchmark, was explored against census active-commuting shares, and a bias-corrected output-oriented data envelopment analysis frontier was estimated. One standard deviation of deficit went with a 1.3–2.6-point lower active-commuting share, an exploratory association sensitive to spatial dependence. Twenty station areas (15.9%) formed the frontier; mean efficiency was 0.650 (0.551 after bias correction) and mean scale efficiency 0.888. The two measures agreed partially (ρ = 0.307), and three station areas fell in the worst decile of both. Rankings were stable to weights, typology, frontier specification, peers, threshold, elevation error and missing records, whereas agreement with an order-m partial frontier was weak (ρ ≈ 0.35). A priority matrix links station area to land-use instruments.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112107

Authors: Şevval Kasap Cenk Hamamcıoğlu

Earthquakes disrupt transportation systems not only through structural damage but also through environmental conditions and functional dependencies. Since resource constraints require incremental resilience interventions, spatial risk prioritization is essential. This research proposes an integrated spatial framework to assess the seismic risk of critical transportation corridors and establish a basis for prioritization. The criterion hierarchy is structured into three main categories and thirteen sub-criteria, encompassing natural–geotechnical, structural–physical, and environmental–functional components of risk. Weights were derived using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) from a nine-person expert panel across three disciplines. Criterion scores were integrated within a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment to generate a spatial risk surface. The framework was applied to the Avcılar–Bakırköy section of the D-100 Highway in Istanbul. Sensitivity to expert composition was tested by comparing risk surfaces derived from discipline-specific weights. The findings indicate that seismic risk is too multidimensional to be reliably evaluated from a single disciplinary perspective, underscoring the imperative for a multidisciplinary approach. This interdisciplinary framework facilitates the identification of highway segments to be prioritized for detailed assessment. Ultimately, this work provides a holistic decision-support framework for corridor-based seismic risk assessment, whose workflow can be adapted to other corridors after local recalibration.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112106

Authors: Carlos J. L. Balsas Awais Piracha

This Editorial examines ten articles published in the second edition of Land’s Special Issue on strategic planning for urban sustainability. The articles fall into five groups: visualisation of land transformation; industrial land transformation and planning; urban vitality; healthcare accessibility and population mobility; and landscape planning. Drawing on the guest co-editors’ professional paths, we consider the contributions of these studies to planning under conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The collection combines detailed spatial analyses with research on institutions and development pressures. A question is raised that runs through the Editorial: how can knowledge of particular places and problems inform wider choices about urban development? We discuss the interpretation of evidence, the resources and coordination needed to act on this evidence, and the distribution of benefits and costs. The conclusion identifies questions for further research on planning commitments over time, public reasoning, regeneration and institutional responsibility.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112104

Authors: Yuan Zeng Jun Wen Muqi Xiao

Land finance is an important funding base through which Chinese local governments promote urban construction and economic development, yet its relationship with urban credit expansion remains insufficiently understood. Using panel data for 287 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2007 to 2022, this study applies a two-way fixed-effects model to examine the relationship between land finance dependence and urban credit expansion, including its dynamic and structural features. The results show a significant positive association between land finance dependence and urban loan growth: a 0.1 increase in land finance dependence is associated with an average increase of approximately 0.316 percentage points in the urban loan growth rate. This positive relationship is concentrated in the current and following years. Cities with greater land finance dependence also exhibit faster loan growth relative to locally recorded deposit and economic output growth, together with a higher loan-to-deposit ratio. Instrumental-variable estimates are directionally consistent but weak, while robustness checks preserve the positive sign across alternative measurements, samples, and fixed-effects structures. These findings document the magnitude, timing, and balance-sheet structure of the relationship between land finance dependence and urban credit expansion, offering city-level evidence for coordinated monitoring of land finance and urban credit.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112105

Authors: Linda Klamann Yousra Khatib Snežana Maletić Alexandra Axt Khoi Chau Minh Lutz Weihermüller

Assessing pesticide bioavailability in paddy soils is critical for understanding environmental fate and potential food safety implications. This study investigated the desorption and immobilization of isoprothiolane and tricyclazole in a clay- and organic-rich Mekong Delta paddy soil, comparing Tenax and XAD-4 as extraction agents and assessing the effect of biochar amendment, using a two-compartment desorption model. Although both compounds fall below the ISO 16751:2020 criterion for Tenax (log Kow > 3), Tenax and XAD-4 did not differ significantly for the moderately hydrophobic isoprothiolane, whereas for the more polar tricyclazole, Tenax yielded a significantly lower fast-desorbing fraction, despite efficient sorption in matrix-free tests. Both pesticides exhibited high fast-desorbing fractions despite the soil’s high clay and TOC content, consistent with their predominantly neutral form at the soil’s low pH; nevertheless, a considerable slowly desorbing fraction of tricyclazole indicates interactions beyond hydrophobic partitioning. Biochar amendment had compound-specific, opposing effects: it significantly reduced the fast-desorbing fraction of tricyclazole at the applied, above-field concentration, whereas it increased that of isoprothiolane without significantly affecting its remaining fraction in soil. Residues of both fungicides were detected in regional rice grain, but could not be directly linked to the laboratory-derived parameters.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112103

Authors: Honghu Sun Yupei Jiang Yuanyuan Cai

Urban vitality is central to sustainable urban development, yet conventional research is rarely organized around the complete range of everyday activities: it seldom distinguishes activity types, so a place may be rated vital on one activity alone, and the behavioral reasons behind reported nonlinearities remain little discussed. Oriented to everyday activities, this study differentiates residential, work, and visiting vitality, integrates them through CRITIC weighting into a comprehensive vitality, and—alongside that overall level—examines subsystem coupling and dominant combinations to form three layers of spatial patterns; it then uses an expanded “5D” built-environment system and XGBoost–SHAP with spatial cross-validation to examine the nonlinear relationships between comprehensive vitality and the built environment. In Nanjing, a large Chinese metropolis, comprehensive vitality shows a sharp core–periphery polarization with a single core and multiple nodes, declining steeply from the innermost rings to the fringe. The three activities are strongly coupled across the city, and low coupling-coordination values mainly reflect low overall activity intensity rather than structural mismatch. Work–visiting combinations dominate, followed by residential–visiting combinations, whereas grids dominated by a single activity type are few. Employment, shopping, and leisure are the leading correlates, with threshold, interaction, and spatially varying associations; the model attribution also varies geographically, clustering in the core. These findings support differentiated, people-centered strategies and 15-min living-circle planning in place of uniform redevelopment.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112102

Authors: Hongmin Zhang Tao Zhou Yajun Geng Tingting Liu Angela Lausch

While the application of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in soil pH prediction has been explored, its predictive capacity has been underestimated because the radar indicators employed are mostly mathematical combinations of backscatter observations. We combined soil pH observations from the LUCAS 2018 topsoil dataset across the Iberian Peninsula with Sentinel-1 backscatter, texture, and interferometric coherence features to develop random forest models and compared their performance with models based on Sentinel-2 optical data. Coherence values decreased and spatial details diminished as the temporal baseline increased, while shorter baselines provided better modeling performance. Models incorporating multiple temporal baselines outperformed those using a single baseline. Among models using a single type of radar information, coherence-based models incorporating all temporal baselines achieved the highest accuracy (R2 = 0.54–0.55), followed by texture-based models, while backscatter-based models performed the poorest (R2 = 0.46–0.48). Notably, most radar-based models achieved higher accuracy than those using Sentinel-2 optical data alone (R2 = 0.44–0.46). Integrating diverse Sentinel-1 radar features further improved prediction accuracy, achieving R2 = 0.59 for pH in H2O and R2 = 0.58 for pH in CaCl2, while adding Sentinel-2 data only slightly enhanced accuracy. Coherence was the most influential variable group, particularly at short temporal baselines. These results highlight the substantial potential of diverse Sentinel-1 radar information for soil pH mapping.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112101

Authors: Anastasia Tasopoulou

Spatial planning systems are shaped by successive institutional reforms that may alter not only planning instruments and procedures but also the governance arrangements through which planning is organised and implemented. This article examines the evolution of local spatial planning in Greece over more than four decades through a longitudinal comparison of three successive generations of planning reform. Drawing on legislative and regulatory frameworks, official policy and programme documents, and the relevant academic literature, the analysis compares the three generations across common dimensions related to planning, institutional organisation and governance. The findings reveal a progressive broadening of the scope and institutional demands of local planning, accompanied by changes in the roles and relationships of public authorities, coordination, participation, planning knowledge and implementation orientation. These changes, however, have not produced a linear transition from hierarchical towards decentralised or collaborative governance, nor a succession of clearly distinct governance models. Instead, the Greek case reveals a process of institutional reconfiguration in which new governance practices and relationships develop alongside persistent institutional characteristics. The study highlights the value of longitudinal comparison for understanding not only the dominant configuration of planning systems, but also the trajectories through which their governance arrangements are progressively transformed over time.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112100

Authors: Lu Jiang Na Kang Wei He Wenmei Li

Accurate assessment of the urban thermal environment is challenged by urban thermal anisotropy (UTA). While UTA impacts microclimate evaluations, its meteorological controls remain unquantified because morphology, solar geometry, and weather co-vary in field observations, and existing UTA models assume static, clear-sky conditions. To address this, we combine 45 UAV-based multi-angle thermal scenarios across three seasons and multiple weather states with univariate controlled simulations. In these simulations, one meteorological factor is varied at a time while urban morphology and materials are held fixed. This design isolates the independent effects of air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction, and cloud cover on UTA intensity (UTAI, the maximum difference among directional brightness temperatures). Near the winter solstice, the clear-sky UTAI reached 22.0 °C at 13:00, about 5.9 times the overcast value at the same hour (3.7 °C) and 3.7 times the cloudy value (5.9 °C); over the full observation period (10:00–14:00), the cloudy/overcast UTAI ranged from 3.7 to 9.6 °C. Near the spring equinox, the clear-sky UTAI ranged from 11.6 to 15.7 °C, about twice the cloudy values (3.9–8.0 °C). Controlled simulations identify wind speed and cloud cover as the dominant suppressors of daytime UTAI: increasing wind speed from 0 to 4 m/s nearly halves noon UTAI, and from 0 to 8 m/s lowers 12:00 UTAI by 3.2 °C; increasing cloud cover from 0 to 8 oktas lowers 09:00 UTAI by 7.5 °C. By contrast, air temperature and relative humidity mainly shift absolute temperatures while leaving the anisotropy pattern nearly unchanged in the vegetation-free built scene examined, and wind direction has a negligible effect under regular morphology. These results quantify how weather modulates UTA, providing a physical basis for all-weather urban microclimate modeling, heat island assessments, and adaptive thermal remote sensing.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112099

Authors: Shibang Li Xiaolin Yang Zengwei Feng

Urban heat risk depends not only on thermal environment intensity but also on the spatiotemporal distribution and diurnal rhythm of population activity. Conventional assessments based on single-phase land surface temperature or static population data cannot capture intraday exposure variation or differences among functional spaces. Using a selected high-temperature day (13 June 2025) in Zhengzhou, this paper builds a Dynamic Thermal Environment Index (DTEI) fusing a static Landsat-derived thermal baseline with intraday variation from Himawari-9. It couples DTEI with a Population Activity Index (PAI) from hourly Baidu heat-map data to construct a 500 m grid-scale Dynamic Heat Exposure Index (DHEI). DHEI’s diurnal rhythm, spatial pattern, and functional-space differences are analyzed, and a two-factor decomposition identifies the hourly relative contributions of DTEI and PAI. Results show that: (1) DTEI, DHEI, and PAI peak at 13:00, 14:00, and 18:00, with DHEI lagging DTEI by 1 h and leading PAI by 4 h; (2) high-DHEI areas concentrate in the central built-up area with a stable spatial pattern, expanding outward and rising in level over the day; (3) exposure intensity follows commercial and residential > public service > transportation, green/recreational, and employment/industrial zones, with markedly different peak timings between groups; and (4) DHEI variation is driven not by a single factor but by alternating thermal environment and population activity contributions, with the peak formed by their joint effect in early afternoon. Dynamic urban heat exposure is thus a time-varying outcome of thermal environment and population activity coupling, offering a useful reference for time- and zone-specific heat-risk management.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112098

Authors: Thomas L. Daniels Amy Lynch

Ten US states and dozens of countries have adopted a goal of preserving 30 percent of their land and water resources by 2030. The US 30 × 30 effort seeks to permanently protect wildlife habitats, provide recreation opportunities, mitigate climate change, and avoid the fragmentation of natural areas and working farms and forestlands. Yet very little research exists on the practice of how to achieve 30 × 30. In 2023, the State of Vermont passed legislation setting 30 × 30 and 50 × 50 as goals. Because Vermont is heavily forested, the preservation of forestland is key to reaching its goals. The fragmentation and parcelization of forests both degrade the forest ecology and reduce the attractiveness for preservation. Land preservation for 30 x 30 involves the availability of large parcels for preservation as well as adequate funding. For land availability, no studies have yet analyzed the local land use tools that can support achieving the 30% land preservation goal. This study fills that gap by analyzing the interaction among use-value property taxation, local zoning, land parcelization activity, and land preservation in 12 forested Vermont towns. Findings show considerable benefit from use-value property taxation, limited benefit from natural resource conservation zoning as practiced in Vermont, and a wide variation in the amount of land preserved. We also found little change in the number of large parcels pre- and post-COVID-19 but some continued land fragmentation among smaller parcels. Dedicated funding for land preservation together with the sustainable management of forests will be essential steps toward effective preservation in any forested region over the long run.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112097

Authors: Ying Pan Jiawei Fan Ying Shi

Regional-scale rural landscapes mediate between macro-scale national landscapes and micro-scale local landscapes. The diversity of their types, and their multi-scale spatial characteristics, remain understudied. Taking China’s Leizhou Peninsula as an example, this study builds a pathway linking landscape zoning, characteristic analysis, and mechanism analysis. A multi-factor overlay divides the peninsula into four subregions: Leibei Plain Zone, Nandu River Delta Plain Zone, Leibei–Leinan Volcanic Platform Zone, Coastal Plain and Terrace Zone. A multi-scale system for analyzing landscape character is then constructed. The four zones differ markedly at the macro scale in village-point distribution and at the meso scale in landscape pattern. At the micro scale they converge on a shared village morphology. We then constitute the mechanism of this differentiation through the human–land relationship. Natural constraint acts at the macro scale, the agricultural production at the meso scale, and the anchoring of local culture at the micro scale. The four zones therefore call for different practical implications. The study develops a transferable multi-scale analytical framework, which provides a reference for rural landscape research in other regions and theoretical support for rural landscape protection and planning at the regional scale.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112096

Authors: Viktorija Brndevska Stipanović Ivana Janeska Stamenkovska Kiril Sotirovski

Rapid urbanization and surface sealing have exposed the limits of conventional grey stormwater infrastructure, prompting a shift toward multifunctional blue–green infrastructure (BGI). This integrative review evaluates six nature-based solution typologies—rain gardens, blue–green roofs, bioswales, constructed wetlands, retention ponds and permeable paving systems—as instruments of urban spatial planning, through a bioeconomic lens. Searches of Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection, supplemented by Google Scholar, yielded 272 publications classified by publication period, research method and thematic domain. The evidence is uneven: 43.4% of records address hydrological function, and 17.3% bioeconomic valuation; 49.3% are reviews or conceptual contributions, and only 8.8% apply a formal economic valuation technique. The reviewed literature indicates that the six typologies are complementary rather than substitutable, occupying distinct treatment-train positions—source control, conveyance and sub-catchment attenuation—and that hybrid green–grey configurations are more robust under extreme events. Applied economic valuation was identified for rain gardens and permeable paving, partially for blue–green roofs and bioswales, and not for constructed wetlands or retention ponds. Lifecycle cost analysis, disservice-adjusted valuation and performance-based planning instruments, rather than further hydraulic documentation, are likely to be decisive for adopting BGI as a standard municipal utility.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112095

Authors: Eryan Guo Yanan Ma Keru Ge Tingting Gao Shuang Yao Ruimin Hu Yanmin Mei Tailin Zhong Zhi Li

Based on a balanced panel of nine provincial-level forest-park systems in the Yellow River Basin over 2013–2022 (90 province-year observations), this study measures the tourism eco-efficiency of forest parks and examines its spatiotemporal evolution and determinants. The unit of analysis is the aggregated forest-park system of each province (i.e., all registered forest parks within each province, aggregated to the provincial level), not individual parks. We combine a slacks-based super-efficiency (super-SBM) model—with four inputs, three desirable outputs, and three undesirable outputs—with the global Malmquist–Luenberger (GML) index, standard deviational ellipse (SDE) analysis, and a random-effects panel Tobit model. To remove price effects, monetary variables were deflated to constant 2012 prices; a small number of missing observations were completed by linear interpolation. The results show that: (1) Mean tourism eco-efficiency was 0.778, rising from 0.486 in 2013 to a peak of 1.077 in 2019, declining to 0.897–0.905 in 2020–2021 under the COVID-19 shock, and recovering to 1.143 in 2022. The mean GML index was 1.182, and mean technological change (TC) exceeded mean efficiency change (EC), suggesting that frontier shifts contributed more to measured productivity growth than efficiency change over the study period, although this conclusion rests on the pooled sample and is examined for robustness. (2) Eco-efficiency was spatially heterogeneous, with lower values in the upper reaches and higher values in the middle and lower reaches; the SDE was oriented east–west and its centroid shifted southeast-to-northwest by a modest distance. (3) At the 5–1% level, per capita GDP and tourism revenue share were positively associated with eco-efficiency and forest-park density negatively associated; highway mileage was positively associated only at the 10% level (p = 0.069); forest cover and employee density were not significant. Because the undesirable-output indicators are provincial industrial emissions allocated to forest parks by the tourism-revenue-to-GDP ratio, and because one regressor (tourism revenue share) is mechanically related to a desirable output, the associations reported here should be interpreted as observational, non-causal evidence. Policy implications are drawn accordingly.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112094

Authors: Lorenzo Gardin Romina Lorenzetti Fabrizio Ungaro

Digital soil mapping (DSM) supports the implementation of the EU Soil Monitoring Law by providing spatially explicit information on key soil properties over large areas. Despite widespread use of machine learning techniques, the influence of modelling strategy and covariate quality on predictive performance remains unclear in heterogeneous regions. This study evaluated three Random Forest-based approaches, Random Forest (RF), Quantile Random Forest (QRF), and a regime-based model (RF-REGIME5), to predict topsoil properties (0–30 cm) across Tuscany (23,000 km2). Two predictor sets were tested: BASE (environmental covariates only) and AUGMENTED (with legacy soil data). Within the three RF-based approaches examined, the inclusion of legacy soil-derived predictors produced more consistent improvements in predictive performance than changes in modelling strategy. Soil-derived covariates improved predictive performance, while differences among modelling approaches were generally limited and property-dependent. QRF performed comparably and additionally quantified prediction uncertainty, especially for skewed variables like soil organic carbon. In contrast, the regime-based approach did not consistently outperform global models, as potential benefits from reduced environmental heterogeneity were offset by smaller sample sizes within individual domains. Overall, improving predictor datasets and expanding soil observation networks appear more effective than increasing model complexity for enhancing regional DSM applications and supporting future soil monitoring efforts.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112093

Authors: Jinglei Sun Xi Chen Qiong Wang

Land-use change is a key driver of carbon cycling and carbon stock changes in regional ecosystems. Taking Huangling County as a case study, this study combined land-use data from 1990 to 2020 with the InVEST model, the Patch-generating Land-Use Simulation (PLUS) model, and GeoDetector to examine the spatiotemporal evolution of land-use change and carbon stocks, identify the drivers of carbon stock spatial heterogeneity, and project land-use patterns and carbon stock changes under alternative development scenarios for 2030. The results showed the following: (1) The land-use structure of Huangling County remained relatively stable during 1990–2020, with forestland and grassland accounting for more than 80% of the total area. Built-up land expanded from 12.58 km2 to 30.12 km2, while cropland decreased overall, indicating the coexistence of ecological land reconfiguration and urban expansion. (2) Total carbon stocks showed a fluctuating decline during 1990–2020, decreasing by 2.57% from 5517 × 104 t to 5375 × 104 t. Forestland constituted the dominant carbon pool, and its change was the primary driver of carbon stock dynamics. (3) Precipitation, NDVI, and elevation were the leading factors associated with carbon stock spatial heterogeneity, with mean q-values of 0.722, 0.669, and 0.588, respectively. Interaction detection revealed the strongest interaction for precipitation–GDP in 2010 (q = 0.829) and NDVI–GDP in 2020 (q = 0.799), highlighting the joint associations of natural and socioeconomic factors with carbon stock patterns. (4) Carbon stocks varied markedly among the 2030 scenarios. The Natural Development Scenario produced the highest carbon stock (5409.98 × 104 t), an increase of 35.36 × 104 t relative to 2020. The Economic Development Priority Scenario exhibited the largest built-up land area (34.18 km2), while the Sustainable Development Scenario maintained a more coordinated land-use structure by balancing ecological protection and socioeconomic development. These findings provide valuable scientific support for land-use optimization and carbon sink enhancement in the hilly–gully region of the Loess Plateau.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112092

Authors: Jianming Meng Qi Zhang

Optimizing spatial land-use configurations is a critical pathway toward achieving spatially balanced ecosystem service values (ESVs) in arid regions. Based on multi-source geospatial data from 1980 to 2025, this study constructs a comprehensive ‘value accounting–attribution diagnosis–multi–objective optimization’ framework. This framework integrates dynamic equivalent factors, driving factor analysis, hot and cold spot analysis, and the ESCI-FLUS model to conduct land-use optimization analysis. The empirical findings reveal that: (1) Exhibiting pronounced asymmetric polarization, ESV dynamics are primarily driven by nighttime lights and surface runoff, reflecting the intricate coupling mechanisms of vulnerable human–earth systems in arid regions. (2) ESV degradation zones are densely clustered along oasis–desert ecotones and urban peripheries; through the topological intersection of significant cold spots across four ecosystem services, this study successfully isolates multidimensional ecological deficit zones totaling 35,034 km2. (3) Spatial reconfiguration under the dual constraints of zero expansion in construction land and ESCI enforcement induces an 11.63% reduction in landscape connectivity alongside a 41.17% contraction in the maximum patch size within deficit areas. By dismantling the contiguous agglomeration of low-value patches and restricting the spatial pathways of ecological risk transmission.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112091

Authors: Xiaodong Zhang Xiaoyu Zhang

Population size change is an important driving force in the evolution of land use and desertification in arid and semiarid areas. The relationship between population size change and land-use change was analyzed using a multi-scale system at the prefecture and township levels. The indirect effect of population size change on PM10 emissions from sandstorms was also discussed. The results were as follows: (1) From 2000 to 2024, population density in the Tarim Basin continued to increase and became increasingly concentrated, forming a spatial pattern of “tower elevation, desert belt formation, and corps jump.” Population growth was highly coordinated with the expansion of cultivated land and construction land and the contraction of bare land at the regional scale. (2) The effect of population changes on land use showed significant spatial non-stationarity, with a pattern of “belt around desert, different from east to west, and heterogeneous from north to south.” The correlation intensity gradually increased from the desert hinterland to the marginal oasis and reached its peak in the oasis town belt. With the “Kashgar–Aksu–Korla” oasis chain as the main axis, the influence showed gradient differentiation toward the desert transition area. Population growth and contraction corresponded to “development-leading” and “recovery-leading” types of land-use transformation, respectively. (3) Bare land and grassland were the most sensitive links in population–land-use coupling. Bare land showed the pattern of “increasing population and increasing nakedness,” and its sharp decrease was concentrated in towns experiencing population outflow, driven by mining, desertification, vegetation degradation, and other third-party processes. Grassland showed the reverse linkage of “reducing population and increasing grass, increasing population and decreasing grass,” and grassland in population outflow areas was undergoing natural recovery. (4) Population size change and dust-storm PM10 formed two indirect transmission paths in opposite directions through the adjustment of land-use structure. They had a deep impact on regional dust emissions through changes in land cover. Population scale changes shaped the land-use pattern through asymmetric paths such as “increasing population and increasing bare land, decreasing population and increasing grass, and increasing population and occupying farmland.” They indirectly affected regional dust and the atmospheric environment through sensitive land types such as bare land and grassland.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112090

Authors: Wangsheng Dou Bo Qin

Competition among local governments has long been recognized as a source of distortions in industrial land allocation, but whether enlarging an intergovernmental cooperation body can correct these distortions remains insufficiently understood. This study takes the enlargement of the Yangtze River Delta Cities’ Economic Coordination Conference as its empirical case, drawing on a panel of 40 prefecture-level cities in the region over 2007–2016. Industrial land misallocation is measured as the distance between the price of industrial land and its marginal product. Applying a difference-in-differences design that compares accession cities with the region’s never-treated cities, we find no evidence that the accessions alleviated industrial land misallocation, and the results are robust to alternative outcomes and specifications. The hypothesized channels do not operate as predicted: market segmentation is essentially unchanged, while local industrial agglomeration declines and city industrial structures diverge from the proportional benchmark. Two descriptive facts help interpret these null results: the cities admitted in 2010 were already close to the efficient price configuration before accession, and the Conference lacks binding instruments over land conveyance. These findings suggest that intergovernmental coordination by itself may not be sufficient to correct land misallocation; doing so would require instruments that bind land conveyance directly and membership criteria that target the misallocation that remains.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112089

Authors: Gerardo E. Soto Joseba Iribarren

Urban green infrastructure and its potential biodiversity benefits are unevenly distributed, but species-level consequences remain poorly characterized in Latin American cities. We combined Sentinel-2 and Dynamic World time series (2015–2025) with effort-filtered eBird records to model the encounter probability of the Striped Woodpecker or Carpinterito (Veniliornis lignarius) within Santiago de Chile’s fixed 2017 urban extent. Generalized additive models were fitted to 4,419 checklists aggregated on a 100-ha hexagonal grid, and the selected habitat relationship was applied to annual NDVI, tree-cover, and built-cover rasters to generate standardized model-based projections. Encounter probability was nonlinearly associated with NDVI (edf = 2.826, p<0.001), with a curve compatible with diminishing gains at higher greenness. Model performance was stable across repeated thinning realizations (median geographically clustered AUC = 0.698), while forward temporal AUC ranged from 0.713 to 0.735 and calibration improved when recent years were included. Study-area mean projected encounter probability fluctuated between 0.107 and 0.135, whereas 2015–2025 endpoint change was positive in 70.7% of hexagons and negative in 29.3%. After false-discovery-rate correction, only 10 of 941 hexagons retained significant monotonic trends. Signed endpoint change was strongly spatially autocorrelated (Moran’s I=0.603, p=0.001), and gains and losses were unevenly concentrated (Gini = 0.485 and 0.584, respectively). Commune-level income and multidimensional poverty were negatively associated with local clustering statistics, providing descriptive socioeconomic context. Thus, Santiago’s annual environmental configurations produced spatially uneven model projections. Urban-forest planning should complement greenness targets with retention and monitoring of large, senescent, and cavity-bearing trees, particularly in under-canopied and disadvantaged areas.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112088

Authors: Yaqiang Dai Yue Zhang Han Gao Shuxian Xie Yue Chen

Balancing urban–rural integrated development (URID) and multifunctional cultivated land (MCL) is crucial to regional sustainable development. However, existing studies mostly focus on the unidirectional impact of urbanization on cultivated land, while the interactive effects between URID and MCL are underestimated. Panel data for 284 Chinese cities at or above the prefecture level from 2000 to 2020 are used. A comprehensive evaluation model, a coupling coordination degree model, and a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model are combined to examine the coupling coordination level and dynamic interactive response between URID and MCL. China’s URID level rose steadily, and the urban–rural dual structure gradually weakened, while MCL became more diversified. The coupling coordination degree between URID and MCL improved continuously, with an overall east-high, west-low spatial pattern. Coordination types shifted frombeing on the verge of imbalance and barely coordinated to primary coordination and moderate coordination; specifically, the proportion of barely coordinated cities dropped from 67.61% to 22.18%, while primarily coordinated cities surged from 17.61% to 63.73% between 2000 and 2020. Regional disparities remained significant, and low-coordination areas were concentrated in the west. The interaction between the two systems was asymmetric. Variance decomposition indicates that URID explains 17.623% of the variation in MCL, whereas MCL only explains 5.867% of URID. The impulse response of MCL to a URID shock was stronger and converged more slowly (period 9), whereas the reverse promoting effect of MCL on URID was relatively weak and converged faster (period 7). This pattern indicates a long-term relationship in which URID evolved actively while MCL adapted passively. Based on these core findings, we recommend implementing region-specific policies to address spatial disparities, establishing a two-way feedback mechanism to enhance the value realization of MCL, and designing adaptive policy tools with cross-period evaluations to overcome the temporal lag in their interaction.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112087

Authors: Zhanglei Chen Mingying Zeng Kar Kheng Gan Bing Zhu Jiazhu Du Tiejun Zhou Yanan Shen

Open-rooftop green spaces can integrate ecological function with restorative experience in high-density cities, yet whether plant configurations that deliver ecological benefits are also restorative remains unclear. This study examined plant-community structure, ecological benefits, and perceived restorativeness across 80 plots within ten publicly accessible ORGSs in Chengdu, using i-Tree Streets and the Perceived-Restorativeness Scale with 380 on-site participants. Annual modeled ecological benefit totaled 284,524 CNY, with carbon sequestration contributing 78.5%. Plant communities were systematically miniaturized (93% of stem < 7.6 cm DBH; 90.55% of individuals < 2.5 m). Perceived restorativeness was highest on ornamental roofs (M = 0.64) and lowest on sports-oriented roofs (M = −0.56); conifer–broadleaf mixed forest ranked first among community types (M = 0.33), and pure bamboo ranked last (M = −0.72). Bivariate associations between ecological benefits and PRS were positive, but this relationship became context-dependent when plant-community characteristics and roof function were jointly considered. Simplified structure was negatively associated with PRS on ornamental roofs (β = −0.52, p < 0.01), yet positively associated on sports-oriented roofs (β = 0.54, p < 0.05). High stem density on sports roofs (β = 0.25, p < 0.05) and tall plants under simplified structure (β = 0.40, p < 0.01) showed positive associations in both dimensions, whereas single-species planting on sports roofs was associated with lower outcomes in both (β = −0.34, p < 0.01). The findings indicate that ecological and perceptual outcomes depend on the fit between planting configuration and functional context, and that ORGSs’ design should coordinate vegetation composition and structure with the intended use of the space.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112085

Authors: Xiangfei Tang Zhen Zhang Zongcai Cai Jing Ding Xiaodong Ge Hehe Liu

Arid inland river basins are ecologically fragile and sensitive to human–land interactions, and their ecological security is central to regional sustainability. Focusing on the Hexi Corridor in northwestern China, this study developed a health–risk–services assessment framework that integrates ecosystem health, ecological risk, and ecosystem services, constructed a comprehensive ecological security index (CESI) for 2010 and 2020, benchmarked it at the pixel scale against a separately derived Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI), and identified the nonlinear explanatory power of natural and anthropogenic factors using an optimal parameter-based geographical detector (OPGD) and explainable machine learning based on XGBoost with Shapley additive explanations (XGBoost-SHAP). The results show that (1) mean CESI rose only slightly, from 0.286 to 0.288, so that spatial differentiation was more pronounced than temporal change; the south-to-north gradient persisted, decreasing from the Qilian Mountains and central oasis corridor toward the northern desert; (2) mean annual precipitation and vegetation cover had the highest explanatory power in 2010 (Q = 0.6168 and 0.6053), whereas by 2020 vegetation cover and mean patch area ranked first and second (Q = 0.6324 and 0.5492); grazing pressure gained explanatory power while temperature contributed negatively to the index, with paired-factor interactions usually exceeding those of single factors; (3) the explanatory power of the variables was not governed by the weights assigned during index construction; and (4) the CESI agreed closely with the RSEI in 2020 (Pearson’s R = 0.782), although this partly reflects their shared vegetation signal. These results show that compositional attribution must be distinguished from external drivers in assessing ecological security in water-limited inland river basins.

Land doi: 10.3390/land15112086

Authors: Lesego Minah Motshekga Johannes Isselstein Simbarashe Ndhleve Kingsley Kwabena Ayisi

Communal rangelands in semi-arid South Africa are increasingly degraded, leading to recurrent feed shortages, yet fodder production technology adoption remains limited and poorly understood. This study employed a cross-sectional survey using a semi-structured questionnaire to collect data from 120 communal and smallholder crop–livestock farmers in Limpopo Province, South Africa, examining the socioeconomic differences between adopters and non-adopters, and identifying the determinants and perceived constraints to adopting biological fodder production technology. Pearson Chi-square analysis revealed that education level, household income, and land ownership were significantly associated with adoption status (p < 0.05). A Probit regression model demonstrated that farming experience, knowledge of fodder production, salary income, farm-generated income, herd size, farmer group membership, and access to extension services significantly increased the likelihood of adoption. Principal Component Analysis identified five major constraint dimensions: low institutional support, lack of resources, lack of knowledge, water scarcity, and competing production priorities. The findings indicated that fodder production adoption is shaped primarily by technology-specific knowledge, productive financial capacity, and institutional support rather than by demographic characteristics alone. By integrating econometric analysis of adoption determinants with multivariate analysis of perceived constraints, the study provides a more comprehensive explanation of fodder production adoption in communal and smallholder crop–livestock systems.