Dear Colleagues,

Climate change and land use/cover (LUC) are closely related. LUC is considered a first-order driver of climate change and has been a central component of most major global environmental change studies, particularly the recent IPCC Assessment Report, which highlights the role of LUC in mitigating climate change. LUC has the potential to contribute to greenhouse gas (GHG) effects through changes in albedo and radiative forcing, and through direct emissions of carbon dioxide and methane associated with anthropogenic activities. Meanwhile, LUC can also serve to mitigate climate change through climate-friendly activities such as afforestation, climate-smart farming, and climate-neutral housing.

Geographic information science (GIS), Earth observation (EO), and artificial intelligence (AI) alongside climate informatics (CI) play a central role in understanding the relationship between climate change and LUC by providing high-resolution spatial data and analytical tools for mapping, attributing, and simulating climate–land interactions. The produced knowledge should shed light on data-driven and climate-friendly land use governance and policy development. Hence, this Special Issue seeks to collect a series of research articles that can contribute to a better understanding of the impacts of climate change on LUC and vice versa, and how GIS, EO, CI, and AI can fill the knowledge/data/tool/policy gaps required for climate-smart land management and governance.

This Special Issue of Land welcomes contributions on the following suggested topics:

• LUC impacts of climate change and vice versa;
• Downscaling climate impacts on LUC;
• Simulating future LUC under a changing climate;
• Simulating compound and cascading effects of climate change on LUC;
• Climate-aware and data-driven urban planning and land governance practices, e.g., multifunctional land use;
• Lessons learnt from critical and representative case studies;
• Producing novel datasets and analytical tools/frameworks for addressing the above-mentioned topics.

Prof. Dr. Jamal Jokar Arsanjani
Guest Editor

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.

• climate change
• land use/cover
• geographic information science (GIS)
• earth observation (EO)
• artificial intelligence (AI)