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Land, Volume 15, Issue 1

2026 January - 202 articles

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Articles (202)

  • Article
  • Open Access
396 Views
29 Pages

22 January 2026

Dryland coastal–mountain systems stand at the frontline of climate change, where steep topographic gradients amplify the balance between resilience and collapse. Mount Elba—Egypt’s hyper-arid coastal–mountain reserve—emb...

  • Article
  • Open Access
336 Views
25 Pages

22 January 2026

Investigating the spatio-temporal differentiation patterns and driving factors of ecosystem services (ESs) supply and demand is of great significance for early warning of ecosystem imbalance risks and identifying regional natural resource supply&ndas...

  • Article
  • Open Access
290 Views
29 Pages

A Method for Determining the Affected Areas of High-Alpine Mountain Trails

  • Andrej Bašelj,
  • Damijana Kastelec,
  • Mojca Golobič,
  • Žiga Malek and
  • Žiga Kokalj

22 January 2026

High-mountain areas with sensitive ecosystems are experiencing a steady increase in visitation, with visitors progressively moving outside designated trails, generating pressures on the natural environment. In extensive areas with numerous access poi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
396 Views
24 Pages

22 January 2026

Skyros Island, the largest island of the Sporades Complex (NW Aegean Sea, Greece), preserves a geologically diverse record spanning from the Upper Permian to the Quaternary, including crystalline and non-metamorphosed carbonate rocks, ophiolitic rock...

  • Article
  • Open Access
453 Views
25 Pages

21 January 2026

Despite the growing recognition of heritage risk reduction, a comprehensive framework for multi-risk assessment remains notably absent within the context of historic urban landscapes (HULs) across diverse global contexts. This paper aims to fill this...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
280 Views
18 Pages

Modeling Water and Salt Dynamics by HYDRUS 2D/3D Under Drip- and Surface-Irrigated Carrot in Arid Regions

  • Warda Tlig,
  • Dario Autovino,
  • Fathia El Mokh,
  • Kamel Nagaz and
  • Massimo Iovino

21 January 2026

Understanding the distribution of water and salt in the crop’s root zone and predicting future soil degradation requires specific monitoring to establish guidelines for irrigation management and system performance. Two field experiments were co...

  • Article
  • Open Access
287 Views
19 Pages

21 January 2026

Rapid urbanization has significantly affected urban ecological environments, necessitating accurate and scientific quality assessments. In this study, we develop an enhanced remote sensing ecological index (WRSEI) for water network cities using Linyi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
332 Views
23 Pages

“Clearer” or More “Blurred”? The Evolution of Urban–Rural Boundaries Since the Proposal of Urban–Rural Integrated Development: A Case Study of Zhengzhou

  • Rongrong Zhang,
  • Yanan Sun,
  • Shaoyang Zhang,
  • Zhiming Dai,
  • Jiaqi Fan,
  • Jiaxiang Han,
  • Zhongmiao Sun and
  • Guangyu Sun

21 January 2026

As China’s urban–rural integrated development strategy advances, traditional urban–rural boundaries are undergoing rapid restructuring. However, it remains unclear whether these boundaries are becoming distinct through factor flow o...

  • Article
  • Open Access
324 Views
29 Pages

21 January 2026

Socio-ecological systems in basin regions characterized by diverse cultural traditions and hierarchical village spatial structure are undergoing profound transformation driven by multifunctional demands and spatial restructuring. This study develops...

  • Article
  • Open Access
513 Views
17 Pages

Land Prices and Determinants of Socio-Economic Development in Pleiku, Central Highlands, Vietnam

  • Tran Trong Phuong,
  • Tran Duc Vien,
  • Nguyen Duc Loc,
  • Phan Van Khue,
  • Nguyen Dinh Trung and
  • Wolfgang Scholz

21 January 2026

The rapid urbanization of Pleiku City, Vietnam, has led to a sharp increase in the demand for and prices of residential land, creating challenges for urban management and land valuation. This study aims to identify and quantify the key factors influe...

  • Article
  • Open Access
355 Views
23 Pages

21 January 2026

The territorial development of the city of Brno during the 19th–21st centuries meant not only the growth of built-up areas (residential, industrial, commercial), but also the absorbing of segments of the ancient rural agricultural landscape. Wi...

  • Technical Note
  • Open Access
338 Views
14 Pages

Detecting Mowed Tidal Wetlands Using Time-Series NDVI and LSTM-Based Machine Learning

  • Mayeesha Humaira,
  • Stephen Aboagye-Ntow,
  • Chuyuan Wang,
  • Alexi Sanchez de Boado,
  • Mark Burchick,
  • Leslie Wood Mummert and
  • Xin Huang

21 January 2026

This study presents the first application of machine learning (ML) to detect and map mowed tidal wetlands in the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland and Virginia, focusing on emergent estuarine intertidal (E2EM) wetlands. Monitoring human disturbances...

  • Article
  • Open Access
288 Views
29 Pages

21 January 2026

The precise identification of territorial space conflicts (TSCs) and their driving mechanisms is key to enhancing spatial security governance. Taking Jinan City as a case study, this research evaluates territorial space suitability across production,...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2,083 Views
35 Pages

20 January 2026

As a neighborhood-scale derivative of the Business Improvement District (BID) model, the Neighborhood Business Improvement District (NBID) represents a collaborative governance framework aimed at fostering spontaneous urban regeneration. Its successf...

  • Article
  • Open Access
403 Views
17 Pages

Dynamics of Native Forests and Exotic Tree Plantations in Southern Chile

  • Alheli Flores-Ferrer,
  • John Gajardo Valenzuela,
  • Claudio Verdugo Reyes,
  • Cristóbal Verdugo Vásquez and
  • Gerardo Acosta-Jamett

20 January 2026

Assessing the dynamics between native forests and exotic tree plantations is key to understanding the drivers of native forest transformation and conservation challenges. We examined these dynamics across four zones in the Los Ríos and Los Lag...

  • Article
  • Open Access
324 Views
24 Pages

20 January 2026

Population migration is an important indicator for measuring the interactions and connections between cities. Analyzing the spatiotemporal distribution pattern of the migration flows between cities is highly important to understanding urban developme...

  • Article
  • Open Access
243 Views
30 Pages

20 January 2026

In the context of global climate governance and China’s ‘Dual Carbon’ strategy, enhancing carbon emission efficiency (CEE) is a critical pathway toward high-quality development. Urban–rural integration (URI), reshaping urban&n...

  • Article
  • Open Access
350 Views
22 Pages

20 January 2026

Tracking ecosystem productivity in fast-evolving estuarine wetlands is often constrained by the trade-off between spatial detail and temporal continuity in satellite observations. To address this, we developed a reproducible fusion–VPM framewor...

  • Article
  • Open Access
347 Views
26 Pages

Soil Quality Index as a Predictor of Maize–Wheat System Productivity Under Long-Term Nutrient Management

  • Deepika Suri,
  • Raj Paul Sharma,
  • Sandeep Gawdiya,
  • Narender Kumar Sankhyan,
  • Sandeep Manuja,
  • Janardan Singh,
  • Tarun Sharma,
  • Nadhir Al-Ansari,
  • Mohamed A. Mattar and
  • Ali Salem

20 January 2026

The long-term effects of integrated nutrient management (INM) on crop performance and soil health—particularly within sub-humid environments—remain insufficiently explored. This research aimed to quantify the relationship between the soil...

  • Article
  • Open Access
286 Views
25 Pages

19 January 2026

Desertification is an ever-growing global ecological and environmental problem. With the implementation of various ecological restoration initiatives, vegetation cover in many desert regions has increased substantially. Consequently, it is essential...

  • Article
  • Open Access
349 Views
24 Pages

19 January 2026

High-precision land cover classification is fundamental to environmental monitoring, urban planning, and sustainable land-use management. With the growing availability of multimodal remote sensing data, combining spectral and structural information h...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
471 Views
23 Pages

19 January 2026

Urban regeneration practices have gained prominence in urban planning in different contexts. Among the different areas subject to urban regeneration, waterfronts stand out as privileged areas of the city and are, therefore, very attractive for new us...

  • Article
  • Open Access
420 Views
34 Pages

18 January 2026

Optimizing the “production–living–ecological” space (PLES) is critical for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in ecologically sensitive mountainous border regions. This study investigates the s...

  • Article
  • Open Access
447 Views
19 Pages

Effectiveness of Protected Areas in the Conservation of Nothofagus antarctica Forests in Santa Cruz, Argentina

  • Rocío L. Arcidiácono,
  • Nirvana N. Churquina,
  • Julián Rodríguez-Souilla,
  • Juan M. Cellini,
  • María Vanessa Lencinas,
  • Francisco Ferrer,
  • Pablo L. Peri and
  • Guillermo Martínez Pastur

18 January 2026

Protected areas (PAs) constitute a fundamental strategy for mitigating biodiversity loss. The land–sparing approach has expanded in response to international agreements, but expansion of PAs does not guarantee conservation objectives. The objec...

  • Article
  • Open Access
415 Views
29 Pages

17 January 2026

As global production networks become increasingly regionalized, diversified, and resilience-oriented, metropolitan areas (MAs) have emerged as important spatial platforms for industrial development. This study examines whether China’s national-...

  • Article
  • Open Access
772 Views
21 Pages

Naming as Resistance: Nahuatl Toponymy and Territorial Dispossession in San Antonio Cacalotepec, Mexico

  • Melissa Schumacher,
  • Andrea Galindo-Torres,
  • Laura Romero and
  • Sarah Herrejón-Montes

16 January 2026

The Indigenous community of San Antonio Cacalotepec, located in the region of Cholula in central Mexico, has been an active witness to territorial dispossession at the hands of powerful real estate capital. This small territory—where clean water once...

  • Article
  • Open Access
307 Views
24 Pages

16 January 2026

Drastic cropland expansion and its internal structural changes have had an obvious impact on agricultural landscapes and ecosystem services. However, a prolonged investigation of this effect is still lacking in China’s grain-producing bases, su...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
331 Views
23 Pages

16 January 2026

Climate change increasingly threatens global food security through disrupted precipitation patterns and extreme weather events, requiring resilient systems for assessing agricultural vulnerability. This study developed and compared machine learning a...

  • Article
  • Open Access
547 Views
29 Pages

16 January 2026

The ecological network serves as a vital spatial strategy for addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, and habitat fragmentation. Addressing limitations in existing ecological network studies—such as strong subjectivity and insufficient ac...

  • Review
  • Open Access
931 Views
15 Pages

Methodological Approaches to Assess the Resilience of Farming Systems to Climate Change: Examples from Latin America

  • Clara I. Nicholls,
  • Ángel Salazar-Rojas,
  • Luis Vázquez,
  • Rene Montalba,
  • Mónica Machado,
  • Inés Gazzano,
  • Alejandro Henao and
  • Miguel A. Altieri

16 January 2026

The erratic nature, increasing prevalence, and intensity of extreme meteorological phenomena are forcing researchers and farmers to urgently develop adaptation practices to enhance the resilience of agroecosystems to climate change. It is strategical...

  • Article
  • Open Access
403 Views
26 Pages

15 January 2026

The identification of supplementary cultivated land as a reserve resource is of great significance for ensuring implementation of the new mechanism of land occupation and compensation balance in China. Using Jiangsu Province as a case study, here, we...

  • Article
  • Open Access
420 Views
23 Pages

Multi-Scenario Assessment of Ecological Network Resilience and Community Clustering in the Yellow River Delta

  • Yajie Zhu,
  • Zhaohong Du,
  • Yunzhao Li,
  • Chienzheng Yong,
  • Jisong Yang,
  • Bo Guan,
  • Fanzhu Qu and
  • Zhikang Wang

15 January 2026

The rapid economic and urban development in the Yellow River Delta Efficient Ecological Economic Zone (YRDEEZ) has intensified land use changes and aggravated ecological patch fragmentation. Constructing ecological networks (ENs) can reconnect fragme...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
343 Views
20 Pages

15 January 2026

Ecological continuity cannot be limited to spatial surfaces and corridors without consideration of the day–night cycle. This integration is achieved through the implementation of dark infrastructure, a field that remains comparatively understud...

  • Article
  • Open Access
375 Views
30 Pages

14 January 2026

Informal settlements are widely present and important urban spaces, providing valuable living spaces for many migrant populations, low-income groups, and indigenous peoples. However, urbanization faces a common challenge: the transformation of inform...

  • Article
  • Open Access
405 Views
21 Pages

14 January 2026

Excess commuting reflects the inefficiency of urban land resource allocation, generating additional greenhouse gas emissions and social costs, and has therefore become a central concern in the pursuit of sustainable cities. While exogenous shocks ine...

  • Review
  • Open Access
713 Views
25 Pages

The Impacts of Extreme Weather Events on Soil Contamination by Heavy Metals and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons: An Integrative Review

  • Traianos Minos,
  • Alkiviadis Stamatakis,
  • Evangelia E. Golia,
  • Chrysovalantou Adamantidou,
  • Pavlos Tziourrou,
  • Marios-Efstathios Spiliotopoulos and
  • Edoardo Barbieri

14 January 2026

Floods and wildfires are two extreme environmental events with significant yet different impacts on soil health and on two particularly important soil pollutants, heavy metals (HMs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are directly asso...

  • Article
  • Open Access
408 Views
26 Pages

Quantifying Urban Expansion and Its Driving Forces in the Indus River Basin Using Multi-Source Spatial Data

  • Wenfei Luan,
  • Jingyao Zhu,
  • Wensheng Wang,
  • Chunfeng Ma,
  • Qingkai Liu,
  • Yu Wang,
  • Haitao Jing,
  • Bing Wang and
  • Hui Li

14 January 2026

Urban expansion and its driving factors are frequently analyzed within administrative regions to inform regional urban planning, yet such analyses often fall short at the natural basin scale (referring to the spatial extent defined by hydrological dr...

  • Article
  • Open Access
488 Views
23 Pages

14 January 2026

Spatial equity of healthcare services is a critical concern in social equity and spatial justice research. Despite the availability of various methods to measure this equity, few studies have integrated the supply–demand coupling perspective wi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
414 Views
21 Pages

14 January 2026

Against the backdrop of rapid urbanization and land development, the degradation of regional ecosystem services and the intensification of ecological risks have become prominent challenges. This study takes the Pinglu Canal Economic Belt—a regi...

  • Article
  • Open Access
380 Views
22 Pages

14 January 2026

Urban competitiveness encapsulates a city’s comprehensive capacity for development. Utilizing panel data for 282 prefecture-level cities from 2012 to 2020, this study constructs an evaluation index system of urban competitiveness and applies ke...

  • Article
  • Open Access
433 Views
37 Pages

13 January 2026

This article presents a methodology for assessing the ecosystem external costs linked to land-use changes caused by utility-scale photovoltaic systems using a regionalized life cycle approach. The core scientific challenge is to integrate a typically...

  • Article
  • Open Access
359 Views
40 Pages

13 January 2026

The goal of this scientific study is to clarify whether and how digital–intelligent integration contributes to urban carbon efficiency and to identify the conditions under which this contribution becomes nonlinear and policy-relevant. Focusing...

  • Article
  • Open Access
393 Views
27 Pages

13 January 2026

While artificial intelligence (AI) has advanced urban land use classification, its application in high-stakes decision making, such as urban planning, demands not only high accuracy but also transparency and interpretability. This study evaluates the...

  • Article
  • Open Access
335 Views
38 Pages

13 January 2026

Globally, more than 60,000 abandoned open-pit mines have been identified. Most of these sites lack effective management or ecological restoration measures. As a result, they pose substantial environmental and socioeconomic challenges. Against this ba...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
426 Views
23 Pages

13 January 2026

Accurate cropland mapping in data-scarce regions remains challenging due to limited field data, strong interannual climatic variability, and heterogeneous cropping systems. This study proposes an NDVI-based training sample migration framework that tr...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
464 Views
31 Pages

13 January 2026

Under rapid urbanization and ecological transformation, balancing authenticity preservation with adaptive reuse presents a major challenge for industrial heritage landscapes. This study investigates the Dagushan Iron Mine in Anshan, China’s fir...

  • Feature Paper
  • Article
  • Open Access
529 Views
18 Pages

Distribution and Sources of Heavy Metals in Stormwater: Influence of Land Use in Camden, New Jersey

  • Thivanka Ariyarathna,
  • Mahbubur Meenar,
  • David Salas-de la Cruz,
  • Angelina Lewis,
  • Lei Yu and
  • Jonathan Foglein

13 January 2026

Heavy metals are widespread environmental contaminants from natural and anthropogenic sources, posing risks to human health and ecosystems. In urban areas, levels are elevated due to industrial activity, traffic emissions, and building materials. Cam...

  • Article
  • Open Access
311 Views
20 Pages

12 January 2026

Understanding the spatiotemporal evolution of forest biomass energy potential is essential for supporting low-carbon land-use planning and regional energy transitions. China, characterized by pronounced spatial heterogeneity in forest resources and e...

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Land - ISSN 2073-445X