Dear Colleagues,

At the end of the 20th century, documents like the World Heritage Guidelines or the European Landscape Convention proposed new and challenging ways of conceptualizing landscape assessment and governance. Consequently, in the last two decades, numerous countries have reevaluated their national planning systems and landscape conservation policies.

During the same time, social media has grown into an extensive source of data with a certain influence on how we regard spaces. Currently, numerous researchers are advocating for the value of social media data in better comprehending ecosystem services’ provision, use, and intensity. Through social media, we may also better comprehend people's patterns of behavior, or how they perceive their landscapes.

The relationship between social media and our current understanding of landscapes and urbanscapes allows for pertinent questions: Is social media useful for administrations in recognizing and adapting to changes in land use, patterns of mobility, or landscape meaning? Is it bringing about a more democratic understanding of the landscape and its conservation? Does it serve local communities to express their feelings towards governance policies? Do any of these factors align with the concepts laid out by international organizations like the IUCN, UNESCO, or the European Council?

In this new Special Issue, we also wanted to extend the scope to the influence of the virtual in our daily lives. New digital technologies have been incorporated into social and cultural processes to such a degree that the divide between the physical and the virtual has largely diffused. This new reality profoundly affects contemporary conceptions of landscapes, both cultural and natural, with dramatic implications for urbanscapes and their constituent architectural elements.

We invite you to delve into the relationship between contemporary forms of landscape valuation and governance and current social media. Possible lines of research include the current connections of social media with the following topics:

• The impact of social media and the virtual in general in the places we inhabit;
• User-Generated Content (UGC) or online surveys and the social perception of space;
• Big data, social media, and spatial research: implications of the meshing of qualitative and quantitative research methods;
• New methods for urban management and professional practices;
• Participatory scenarios and land planning based on online technologies;
• Digital twins, deep mapping, and the virtual datafication of physical spaces: their uses and impact;
• Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and governance decentralization;
• Multi-scale processes and social–ecological resilience;
• Spatio-temporal patterns for the maintenance of the living landscape;
• Sustainable governance and rural landscape stewardship;
• Inclusive and participatory land governance: a cross-country comparison.

Dr. Nicolas Marine
Dr. Cecilia Arnaiz Schmitz
Dr. Yael Allweil
Guest Editors

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• Landscape Governance in the Age of Social Media in Land (11 articles)