Aims & Scope

Aims

Land (ISSN 2073-445X) is an international, interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary open access journal of:

• Land system science and social–ecological system research;
• Land/land-use/land-cover change;
• Land management including agriculture, forestry, the built environment and others;
• Landscapes, landscape design and landscape planning;
• Land–climate interactions, including climate–biosphere–biodiversity interactions;
• Land/Soil/Water Systems: the interconnecting networks of biological, chemical, and physical systems;
• Urban contexts, urban–rural interactions and urban planning and development;
• Assessment and evaluation frameworks, indicators, indices, methods, tools and approaches (ecosystem services, multifunctionality and sustainability);
• The water, energy, land and food (WELF) nexus;
• Land, biodiversity and health nexus;
• Emerging technologies of data processing (deep learning/machine-based learning).

It publishes reviews, regular research papers, perspective and discussion papers, short communications and research notes, and there is no restriction on the maximum length of the papers.

Our aim is to encourage scientists to publish their empirical, experimental and theoretical research in as much detail as possible.

Full experimental and/or methodical details and data documentation must be provided for research articles. Computed data or files regarding the full details of the experimental procedure, if unable to be published in a normal way, can be deposited as supplementary material.

Research papers should ideally go beyond describing narrow case studies. They should either relate case studies to their regional/social–ecological/global context and address issues of transferability considering the usefulness for and interest of an international auditorium or should at least be based on comparative study designs. Contrariwise, communications or short notes can introduce (interim) case study results and experiences.

The unique features of this journal for which contributions are particularly invited and welcome are:

• Manuscripts regarding research perspectives, proposals and research ideas;
• Manuscripts concerning summaries and surveys on research cooperation and projects (that are founded by national governments, the EU or others) providing information for a broad range of users;
• Manuscripts that document how to transfer research findings to practice and implement findings in planning, decision making or policy processes;
• Manuscripts that introduce innovative modeling and/or impact assessment tools including prototypes and conceptual approaches;
• Manuscripts that report on failures (methods, approaches, hypotheses, assumptions, analytics and interpretation) and discuss how these could be avoided;
• Lead papers that introduce a Special Issue but go beyond a summary of the contributions (synthesis + review and conclusions).

Subject Areas

• Land systems science and social–ecological systems research;
• All aspects of land use and land cover change;
• Land-related issues in climate, ecology, environmental/geosciences, social, economic (sustainability) sciences and biodiversity research;
• Land-related aspects of nature and biodiversity governance;
• Land-related aspects of biodiversity and health;
• Land-related aspects of human–wildlife interactions including synergies and conflicts;
• Land management, including the application of ecosystem services, multifunctionality or other concepts;
• Livelihoods, food security and supply chains in relation to land issues;
• Land-related trade-off analyses in resource management (e.g., food–energy–water–biodiversity–health nexuses);
• Land-related aspects of achieving the UN Sustainability Goals;
• Land tenure/ownership/disposal rights, including disputes, telecoupling, geopolitical trends and land grabs;
• Ecosystems/hydrosystems and/or complex multiscalar and thematic system processes;
• Landscape and territorial planning, conservation and management;
• Landscape design/landscape architecture;
• Landscape archaeology/history;
• Urban contexts, urban planning and urban–rural interactions;
• Soil–water systems in natural and managed (agriculture and forest) systems; provision of/regulating/supporting cultural ecosystem services; soil degradation, desertification, and sustainability; soil health;
• Land–climate interactions including energy fluxes, carbon and other biogeochemical cycles, and hydrological processes;
• Land—observation and monitoring;
• Land innovations—data and deep learning.

MDPI Publication Ethics Statement

MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). MDPI takes the responsibility to enforce a rigorous peer-review together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. MDPI takes such publishing ethics issues very seriously and our editors are trained to proceed in such cases with a zero tolerance policy. To verify the originality of content submitted to our journals, we use iThenticate to check submissions against previous publications.

Book Reviews

Authors and publishers are encouraged to send review copies of their recent related books to the following address. Received books will be listed as Books Received within the journal's News & Announcements section.

MDPI
Grosspeteranlage 5
CH-4052 Basel
Switzerland

Copyright / Open Access

Articles published in Land will be Open-Access articles distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The copyright is retained by the author(s). MDPI will insert the following note at the end of the published text:

Reprints

Reprints may be ordered. Please contact publisher@mdpi.com for more information on how to order reprints.

Announcement and Advertisement

Announcements regarding academic activities such as conferences are published for free in the News & Announcements section of the journal. Advertisement can be either published or placed on the pertinent website. Contact e-mail address is land@mdpi.com.