Agroforestry Systems and Sustainable Development: New Challenges for Landscape Planning

Dear Colleagues,

Agroforestry landscapes are frequently deployed by a strong anthropogenic pressure, in favor of urban areas, industrial, tertiary, or intensive agricultural activities. Nonetheless, these areas have been studied less than other contexts, such as urban ones. The contingency of the COVID-19 crisis is highlighting a new role for rural areas, thanks to the increase in so-called “smart working” and the increasing appreciation for green spaces. Recent European policies consider the landscape/environment as the engine for sustainable and resilient development. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the EU Green Deal, and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, for example, provide new goals to be implemented on the rural landscape, such as climate change mitigation strategies, implementing local identity, balancing the distribution of population in the territories, providing ecosystem services, agricultural productions, and supporting the development of a circular economy.

All these premises establish the need of a new vision for “the future of rural areas and the place they should have in our society”. This Special Issue aims at providing new approaches, techniques, and models to provide new knowledge about rural areas, establishing a scientific debate on new integrated methodologies for land-use/cover analysis and prediction, a new delineation of rural area types or features, as well as the use of environmental indicators for the assessment of scenario analyses.

Papers on, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome:

• The role of rural areas towards the mitigation of environmental risks (climate change, wildfires, etc.);
• Land-use change prediction models;
• Historical land-use change studies;
• Ecosystem services assessment and modeling;
• Blue and green infrastructures;
• Decision support systems;
• Landscape planning and design;
• Survey and analysis techniques and tools;
• Circular economy processes applied to rural production;
• COVID-19 implications for agricultural activities.

Prof. Dr. Stefania Pindozzi
Dr. Elena Cervelli
Guest Editors

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