Land

Anthropogenic polymers have become an increasingly important class of emerging contaminants in terrestrial ecosystems. While extensive research has focused on microplastics in aquatic environments, their interactions with soil systems and particularly with soil organic matter (SOM) remain insufficiently understood. Soil represents a major environmental sink for polymer residues originating from a…

Protected areas are increasingly expected to reconcile biodiversity conservation with socio-economic sustainability, yet operational tools for assessing local sustainability are limited. This study develops a replicable viability index as an operationalization of socio-economic sustainability at the settlement scale, focusing on the capacity of rural communities to maintain demographic balance an…

With the accelerating processes of globalization and urbanization, metropolitan fringe areas—situated at the intersection of urban expansion and rural transformation—have become critical focal points in urban geography, regional economics, and urban–rural planning. Within the context of China’s new urbanization strategy and the national “dual circulation” framework, the role of policy evolution i…

The rapid growth of hiking tourism presents a critical challenge for balancing visitor safety with the sustainable management of ecologically fragile mountain environments. Traditional models developed in urban settings struggle to capture the highly non-linear, heterogeneous, and zero-inflated characteristics of wilderness trekking behavior. In order to quantify the nonlinear and threshold-based…

Urban railway corridors—including abandoned, redesigned, and in-use lines—can support biodiversity and ecological connectivity in fragmented cities, yet their ecological dynamics and roles in Nature-based Solutions (NbS) remain poorly understood. Addressing this requires a context-sensitive approach that differentiates corridor types and compares their ecological functions. This study compares ve…

Africa’s rainfed agricultural systems are highly exposed to climate change, making shifts in temperature and rainfall a major concern for staple-food crop production. Using a MaxENT ecological niche modelling approach with crop occurrence, elevation, soil and climatic predictors, this study assessed current and future suitability for rainfed maize, millet and sorghum under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5. Th…

Since the 1960s, research on sea-level rise (SLR) and land subsidence has grown significantly; however, comprehensive syntheses remain limited. This study presents a systematic review of 2171 publications spanning 1964–2025, combining a global perspective with a regional focus on the Gulf of Guinea, a critically underrepresented region within the African continent. The results show a steady incre…

Small settlements in Serbia are confronted with long-term processes of depopulation, ageing, and migration, characterised by pronounced spatial and structural heterogeneity. This raises questions about the effectiveness of uniform development policies and underscores the need for a differentiated, place-based approach. The aim of this paper is to identify the demographic heterogeneity of small se…

Urban green spaces provide essential ecosystem services, yet mismatches between subjective perceptions and objective assessments may constrain effective planning. This study examines the correspondence between perceived and measured ES across two contrasting urban green spaces in Shanghai: Century Park, a managed urban park, and Sanlin Green Space, a naturalistic urban forest. Objective ecosystem…

Rail-trail corridors in the agricultural Midwest exhibit layered ecological conditions influenced by the material legacy of railroad infrastructure and contemporary land use pressures. This study uses a mixed-methods approach integrating GIS analysis, field documentation, and open-response surveys with trail managers to characterize the structural and ecological heterogeneity of two rail-trails w…

The study analyzes flood susceptibility in the Banat Hydrographic Area (Romania) using an integrated GIS framework based on MCDA–AHP multicriteria analysis and the multitemporal evaluation of static and dynamic factors for two scenarios (2005 and 2023). The results highlight differences between the two scenarios, mainly driven by variations in precipitation: although the moderate class remains do…

In the context of global climate change, the “dual carbon” goals, and land space planning, this study integrates the Patch-generating Land Use Simulation (PLUS) model, the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) model, and a soil respiration model (Heterotrophic Respiration, Rh) to simulate land use change and estimate Net Ecosystem Productivity (NEP) from 2002 to 2023. It projects the carbon sink…

Climate change and population growth are intensifying water scarcity in arid regions, yet previous analyses focusing on a single driver may not fully capture the compounded effects of climatic and anthropogenic factors. This study integrates water-balance analysis, trend analysis, and correlation-based statistical analysis to examine the combined effects of hydroclimatic anomalies and socioeconom…

In the context of China’s rapid urbanization and rural land marketization reforms, the entry of rural collectively owned commercial construction land into the market (ERCCCLM) coexists with the traditional government-led land expropriation, forming a dual land supply system. China’s dual-structure land ownership system—where urban land belongs to the state and rural land to rural collectives—aims…

This study investigates the relationship between farmland scale and technical efficiency. Using a household-level dataset from 10 provinces in China, we employed a flexible Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model to simultaneously estimate technical efficiency and evaluate its relationship with farmland scale. The results show that the average technical efficiency scores for the full sample, whe…

The synergistic and mutually reinforcing relationship between the development of the new energy industry and comprehensive land consolidation is crucial for integrating ecologically fragile areas into the national “dual carbon” goals and supporting regional high-quality development. Based on a systematic literature review, field investigations in typical regions, and multi-case comparative analys…

Under the background of the global “polycrisis”, enhancing ecological resilience has become a key pathway for achieving sustainable urban development, particularly in ecologically fragile regions. This study takes the Loess Plateau as the study area and constructs an evaluation framework for urban ecological resilience based on three dimensions: resistance, adaptability, and recovery. By integrat…

Enhancing carbon productivity is fundamental to achieving carbon neutrality while sustaining economic growth. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset of Chinese cities from 2010, 2015, and 2020, this study investigates the spatiotemporal patterns and underlying drivers of urban carbon productivity (UCP). Methods including kernel density estimation, spatial autocorrelation analysis, and the spatial Durb…

Urban squares remain underrepresented in conservation-oriented literature compared with parks, street trees and green infrastructure. This scoping review uses CS-derived categories as an analytical lens to examine how the literature on urban squares frames conservation targets, direct threats, contributing factors and conservation actions. Following PRISMA-ScR, we searched Scopus and Web of Scien…

Vegetation restoration is critical for ecosystem recovery in abandoned mining areas, yet how restoration age affects soil multifunctionality (SMF) and the underlying microbial regulatory mechanisms remains poorly understood. The space-for-time substitution method was employed in this study. Along a revegetation chronosequence (Restoration 1 year (R1), Restoration 10 year (R10), Restoration 30 yea…