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

A special issue of Land (ISSN 2073-445X). This special issue belongs to the section "Urban Contexts and Urban-Rural Interactions".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 April 2024 | Viewed by 2938

Special Issue Editors

Department of Geography, Spanish National University of Distance Education (UNED), Paseo de la Senda del Rey 7, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Interests: land use change; land use scenarios; land use planning; urban and rural dynamics; education for sustainable development
Department of Geograph, Spanish National University of Distance Education (UNED), Paseo de la Senda del Rey 7, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Interests: rural geography; agrarian landscapes; wine landscape; changes of the territory; geohistorical sources; geodemography
Department of Geography, Spanish National University of Distance Education (UNED), Paseo de la Senda del Rey 7, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Interests: geographic information systems; remote sensing; land use changes; urban growth; forest fires
Department of Geology, Geography and Environment Sciences, University of Alcalá, 19001 Guadalajara, Spain
Interests: geographical information systems and technologies; natural risks; land use/cover and climate change scenarios; statistical and spatial modeling; socio-economics; didactics; education

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

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

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

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

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

Dr. Marta Gallardo
Dr. Julio Fernandez Portela
Dr. David Cocero
Dr. Lara Vilar
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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

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

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

Keywords

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

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

19 pages, 36239 KiB  
Article
Evolution and Transformation Analysis of Land-use in Mountainous “Granary”—Evidence from Typical Basin in Karst Mountainous Areas of Southwest China
by Mei Chen, Yangbing Li, Yiyi Zhang, Limin Yu and Linyu Yang
Land 2024, 13(1), 4; https://doi.org/10.3390/land13010004 - 19 Dec 2023
Viewed by 637
Abstract
Intermountain basins are the granaries of the karst mountains of southwest China. Revealing the process and trend of land-use transformation in typical mountainous “granaries” is of great significance to optimizing land-use, food security, and rural revitalization in the karst mountains of southwest China. [...] Read more.
Intermountain basins are the granaries of the karst mountains of southwest China. Revealing the process and trend of land-use transformation in typical mountainous “granaries” is of great significance to optimizing land-use, food security, and rural revitalization in the karst mountains of southwest China. Lianjiang basin in Huishui County is the largest in Guizhou Province of southwest China, and a typical mountainous “granary” is used as a case study area. Based on seven periods of high-definition remote sensing images from 1966 to 2020 and on-the-spot investigation, we adopt the analysis methods of landscape pattern, moving window, and buffer zone and conduct an in-depth study on the spatial evolution of land-use and the land-use transformation law of the typical “granaries” of karst mountainous areas in southwest China from the perspectives of changes in the quantity of land-use, changes in the types of land-use, and changes in the landscape pattern. The results showed that the transformation of land-use in the basin was mainly manifested in the transformation of the function of cultivated land and the diversification of the function of cultivated land. The landscape pattern of the basin was gradually transformed from traditional rural landscape to modern agricultural landscape. The gradient effect of land-use evolution and transformation in the study basin was obvious. Traffic, location, and land resources significantly affect land-use transformation in the basin. Based on the above analysis, this paper proposes that the “granary” basins in karst mountainous areas should optimize the land-use of the basin by the trade-off between regional socio-economic development, ecological protection, and food security. The results of this paper provide a reference for land-use optimization and rural development in the granary-type basins and other similar areas in the karst mountains of southwest China. Full article
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15 pages, 6915 KiB  
Article
Land Use and Land Cover Changes in Depopulated Areas of Mediterranean Europe: A Case Study in Two Inland Provinces of Spain
by Marta Gallardo, Julio Fernández-Portela, David Cocero and Lara Vilar
Land 2023, 12(11), 1967; https://doi.org/10.3390/land12111967 - 25 Oct 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 820
Abstract
Depopulation often leads to the abandonment of agricultural land and the resulting process of afforestation and reforestation. In this paper, we study the land use changes between 2000 and 2018 in two Spanish provinces, Soria and Teruel. The provinces chosen as case studies [...] Read more.
Depopulation often leads to the abandonment of agricultural land and the resulting process of afforestation and reforestation. In this paper, we study the land use changes between 2000 and 2018 in two Spanish provinces, Soria and Teruel. The provinces chosen as case studies are of particular interest because they have some of the lowest population densities in Europe and continue to suffer depopulation processes that have been ongoing since the mid-20th century. The reasons for this are not immediately clear given that unlike other European regions with similar population density values, for example in Northern Scandinavia, they are not exposed to extreme climatic conditions, nor are they located in isolated mountain regions. Using the CORINE Land Cover database, we observed that in both provinces, there has been an expansion in shrub and forest land uses and a decline in agriculture due largely to the fact that certain areas have been abandoned by their inhabitants, although in other parts of these provinces, the amount of land used for agriculture has increased. Urban growth over this period has been minimal. In the coming years, it seems likely that the population of these areas will continue to fall, given that the policies carried out over decades to try to revert this trend have not been successful. Full article
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Planned Papers

The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.

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

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